A 




■III 111 



,11 III Hi III 



VAGABOND 
IN 
NEW YORK 

OLIVER MADOX 
HUEFFER, 



I '»'„, 

lll»» , 



nil II II nil I, 




Class. 
Book. 



F . U^g 



-H^ 



Gopyri^htN^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A VAGABOND IN NEW YORK 



i 



I 



I 



s 



I 




My favorite pitch is the ring of benches round the fountain 
opposite the General Post Office. 



A VAGABOND 
IN NEW YORK 



BY 

OLIVER MADOX HUEFFER 

Author of "The Artistic Temperament," "Hunt the 
Slipper," "Where Truth Lies," etc., etc. 



EIGHT ILL USTRA TIONS 

BY 

ROY E. HALLINGS 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 

TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN MCMXIII 



Copyright, 1913 
By JOHN LANE COMPANY 



The Vail-Balloo Company 
Binghamton, New York, U. S. A. 

O'Cl,A354500 



"EHRWARTEND" 



"For to admire and for to see, 

For to be'old this world so wide ; 

It never done no good to me, 

But I can't stop it if I tried." 

Kipling. 



I 



PREFACE 



AT the time when some of these 
sketches were appearing in the 
pages of Truth I received a 
letter from an earnest-minded reader, enquir- 
ing whether they were supposed to be " re- 
motely founded on fact," or were merely " the 
imaginative efforts of a common or garden 
liar." Perhaps I should therefore preface 
them in their collected form with the assurance 
that they are one and all " founded on fact," 
not over and above remotely. They are 
based, as they profess to be, upon the experi- 
ences of a young Englishman during a period 
of vagabondage enjoyed In New York and 
thereabouts. They do not however claim the 
exact fidelity to fact of Hansard or a Law Re- 
port. Vagabondage is a mental no less than a 
physical state of being and, just as a tramp's 

9 



Preface 

progress across the sunny side of life is less 
direct than is, say, that of a bank-manager 
through the shadows, so his mind recalls less 
faithfully all and every entry in the mnemonical 
ledger. Perhaps then, in this narrative some 
terminological inexactitude may here and there 
find expression in word, or exclamation mark, 
or period. Here and there memory may 
heighten a high-light or erase a shadow. No 
vagabond could be expected to swear in a court 
of law to the exact size or brilliancy of every 
politician's near-diamond bosom-pin which may 
have cast its light across his path — or his 
pages — or that the politician smoked exactly 
such a cigar as memory recalls, or indeed 
that he smoked a cigar at all. Sufficient, 
surely, that as such the Vagabond recalls him, 
as smoking, and smoking a cigar, and that the 
cigar was very large and rank. Be it at least 
believed by the gentlemen of the jury that such 
a politician there was, such a steamboat skip- 
per, such a policeman, such an elephant, as 
those the Vagabond has sought to draw, and 
that their doings and sayings, their relation- 

lO 



Preface 

ship towards him and towards each other are 
recorded with as much fidelity as memory will 
allow. 

Naturally again, they do not appear under 
their real names. You may walk miles along 
Sixth Avenue and never find Mr. Cholmondely's 
laboratory; the Officer who directs the traffic 
at the corner of Broadway and Union Square 
will not answer to the name of Dempsey; may 
even deny the existence of any officer answer- 
ing to that name. Yet you may believe with- 
out fear of being led astray that Mr. Chol- 
mondely, however called, is at this moment 
somewhere adapting chickens to a new career; 
that Dempsey, whitest man who ever trod shoe- 
leather, is somewhere directing traffic; that 
somewhere Gladys, unmindful of her earlier 
loves, Is making eyes — red, piggy eyes — at 
her mahout of the moment. 

Let It not be thought that these poor 
sketches make any claim to pass as " Impres- 
sions of America " or that they profess to pic- 
ture New York, or any aspect of It, or any- 
thing at all but the little piece of sidewalk upon 

II 



Preface 

which the Vagabond's eyes have fallen as he 
quartered it in search of cigarette-ends. His 
not the conquering brain, the all-seeing eye, 
that can compress a nation within the limits of 
a single volume, as do those Kings of English 
Literature who from time to time make Royal 
Progresses across the Atlantic and back for 
Literary purposes. No fatted calves were 
ever slain for the Prodigal Vagabond; no 
streets were ever decorated; no Fifth Avenue 
mansions flung open against his coming. He 
has but hung upon the skirts of the cheering 
crowd, thankful if, from afar off, he might 
catch some vague glimpse of the Features, the 
Repose, of the Great Man. Not for him to be 
dined and wined, to be feted and ovated; to 
discuss, while thousands hang enraptured on 
his lips or weep over the whorlings of his 
fruitful pen, the Spirit of the American People, 
the Tendencies of American Social Life, the 
Prospects of American Literature, or, most 
precious of all. Himself and his Undying 
Works, considered in the light of American 
royalties. No one realises more fully than 

12 



Preface 

does the shabby Vagabond the impertinence 
that bids him cry, even in the smallest of voices, 
these Gutter Gleanings. At least let it be re- 
membered in his favour that he docs fully 
realise his own limitations; that he Is well 
aware that his vision is from Below, not from 
Above. He would plead also that If his point 
of view be petty and sordid, and with no wish 
or claim to be Literary, it is at least sincere. 

I have to express my thanks to the the editor 
of Truth for his courteous permission to in- 
clude among the rest certain sketches which 
originally appeared In that journal. 

O. M. H. 



n 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface 9 

I A Baby in the Bronx .... 21 

II On Sleeping Out 35 

III Thieves' Kitchen 41 

IV The " Cop " and the " Copper " . 52 
V The Free and Enlightened . . 60 

VI Business Is Business 68' 

VII Among the " Movies " .... 75 

VIII Coney Island 82 

IX "Gladys" 90 

X " Who's Got the Button ? " . . 104 

XI A Pair of Boots 115 

XII " Seeing New York " 130 

XIII A Turn at Starving 137 

XIV The Child Terrible i45 

XV Called to the Bar 157 

XVI A Son of the Empire .... 169 

XVII Under the Red Light .... 182 

XVIII In the Matter of Manners . . 190 

XIX " Follow the Crowd " . . . . 207 

XX Eastward Ho! 218 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



My favourite pitch is the ring of benches round 
the fountain opposite the General Post Office 

Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

I was making myself a cup of tea over the gas- 
stove when Mrs. Isaacs came in to have a little 
business chat 26 *^ 

I was to call at O'Keefe's cafe when I was sent for 64 ^ 

From him they learnt that, as well as a magician 
and a Brahmin of the highest caste, I was a fakir 
and a guru 84 ^ 

We used to take exercise together on the sands of / 

Coney Island in the very early morning . . . io2 ^ 



<^ 



I had a megaphone and explained the sights in a 
loud voice 134 

She made love to me from the first time she saw me 

with my ice-cream tray 150 L^ 

I was sent to Mott Street to get the details of an 

affair 180 (/ 



A VAGABOND 
IN NE W YORK 



I 

i 



CHAPTER I 

A Baby in the Bronx 



I AM not, fundamentally, a baby-worship- 
per. Though, admittedly, necessary to 
our present stage of evolution, they have 
always seemed to me to be adorable rather in 
the abstract than in the concrete and, although 
I hope that, in a case of shipwreck, I should 
willingly give up my place In the boats to all or 
any babies who might be involved, I am not 
altogether sure that my motive would be one 
of pure chivalry. Better death, I am inclined 
to think, than, say, six babies within a radius of 
twenty feet. 

Nevertheless, there are babies and babies, 
and I gratefully admit that, at one very impor- 
tant crisis in my life, I owed the preservation, 
if not of my sanity, at least of my sense of 
proportion, to a very young baby indeed. It 

21 



A Vagabond in New York 

was two months old, or thereabouts, and It 
lived by itself in the Bronx. 

I was very down on my luck just then and 
I was feeling It rather badly. I got used to It 
very soon, thanks partly to the baby and partly 
to a policeman, as you shall hear; but at first I 
felt very lonely and that is quite the worst 
feature of being down on your luck. I am 
inclined to think, also, that for an English- 
man, New York is one of the worst cities to 
choose for the purpose. I have tried several 
other capitals, Paris, Berlin, Rome and so on, 
but none of them affect me with quite the same 
sense of loneliness. Personally, I should not 
very much mind starving, or going to prison, 
or even, I daresay, being hanged, so long as the 
company was good. In Paris now, or Berlin, 
you do not expect company, good or bad. 
The people speak another language, look at 
life out of other eyes; to be lonely among them 
is no more than natural, just as it would be in 
a forest or a big field. To a New Yorker, I 
have no doubt London would seem just as 
lonely as does, or did, New York to me. As 

22 



A 'Baby in the Bronx 



it happens, I am a Cockney, and when it comes 
to starving within the four-mile radius, I can 
always, at a pinch, find some one I know going 
through the same experience at the same time, 
and we can be bright and cheerful together and 
share our impressions, with our noses pressed 
against the same cook-shop window. So no 
doubt could a New Yorker, if he were a vaga- 
bond, in New York. And it came to me with 
a shock to find that In a city where my own 
language was spoken, with minor variations, 
and the people looked and thought and acted 
so very similarly to my own people, that I had 
no one, absolutely no one, with whom to share 
my lack of a good dinner. 

I do not mean to say that I knew no one In 
New York. At the time I must have known 
at least half-a-dozen people, some of them. If 
not intimately, at least sufficiently to ask them 
for my passage back to England with a fair 
chance of getting it. I don't know, because I 
never tried, but I expect so. I did very nearly 
try, once. The man I thought of had an 
office, off Fifth Avenue, In the Thirties. I 

23 



A Vagabond in New York 

started off, three times, I think, or perhaps 
more, to call upon him. I was living up in a 
cheap hall-room on the North Side of Central 
Park at the time — and you have no idea what 
a long way it was to walk. The first time I 
did actually summon up courage to see him, and 
we had a pleasant chat together, and he asked 
me how I was getting on and I found myself 
telling him, quite involuntarily, of the lot I was 
thinking of buying on Fifth Avenue and the 
palace I was going to run up there when I 
could find time to think about choosing an 
architect. I tried, I suppose, a dozen times 
during that Interview, to come to the point, 
arid every time I got within half the dictionary 
of It my tongue shied and threw me and bolted 
off on its own account round a corner and out 
of sight. I gave It up at last and decided I 
would leave it until next day because there was 
just a chance that I might before then pick up 
a purse with a million dollars in it that some 
one had dropped In the street, and in that case, 
of course, I should have bothered my acquaint- 
ance unnecessarily. 

24 



A Bahy in the Bronx 



I didn't find any purse and I started out to 
call on him next morning bright and early. I 
forced myself into the lift all right and into his 
office and he was out. I said I would call back 
in the afternoon, and I did, and I forced myself 
into the lift all right; but, when I got to the 
top, I couldn't force myself through the door, 
so I hung about the corridor for a bit and then 
went down again. And the next time I called 
I even funked entering the lift, and I knew by 
then that it was no good and if I wanted to 
raise money that way I should have to get 
somebody to do it for me. 

I needn't go into the reasons why I was 
down on my luck just then, but I can time the 
moment when I really became a vagabond. It 
was the evening of my return from that office 
in the Thirties. It was about seven o'clock 
and I was making myself a cup of tea over the 
gas-stove when Mrs. Isaacs came in, to have a 
little business-chat. She was a very kind- 
hearted woman and I have no doubt I could 
have got round her again if I had tried hard 
enough. She didn't really give me a fair 

25 



'A Vagabond in New York 

chance though, because almost at the beginning 
she told me that she had only trusted me so 
long because I was English — and that sort of 
thing. 

I really believe she meant it, too — she had 
never let lodgings in England of course — so 
there was only one thing to be done. She let 
me stop there that night and in the morning we 
went into the value of what I had got left in 
the way of dressing-cases and clothes and 
things. She was much too generous ; they were 
really worth uncommonly little, I fear, but it 
ended as satisfactorily to both parties as could 
be expected. We parted quite good friends, 
that is to say, and I had three dollars and no 
liabilities whatever. When It Is a question of 
owing money that you can't pay I would very 
much rather have an American, and especially 
a Jewish- American as creditor, than an Eng- 
lishman. I may of course have been lucky, 
but, as far as my experience goes, they do real- 
ise that It Is possible to be hard-up without 
being necessarily a swindler, and that the hard- 
est words cannot get money out of an empty 

26 




I was making myself a cup of tea over the gas-stove when 
Mrs. Isaacs came in to have a Httle business ctiat. 



A Baby in the Bronx 



pocket. What is more, they put very much 
more faith in your word — especially, I 
honestly believe, if you are English. Mrs. 
Isaacs, for instance, was quite ready to let me 
depart and take my bag and baggage with me, 
if I would only promise to pay her when I 
could. I refused, for one thing because I 
didn't see the remotest chance of ever being 
able to pay her and, after what she had said, 
I didn't feel like bilking her; for another I 
didn't see what good a dressing-case and a port- 
manteau would be to me if I had nowhere to 
put them. 

That morning I made the acquaintance of 
the Baby. 

In the days before I became a vagabond I 
was very fond of going to the Bronx Zoo, I 
liked the beasts, and the gardens were charm- 
ing, and I used to go with friends I was fond of 
and altogether I had very pleasant memories 
of the place. So while I was suffering under 
the first shock of realising exactly what those 
three dollars meant to me, I started out for 
the Bronx Zoo. I hadn't any reason that I 

n 



A Vagabond in New York 

know of; my mind had gone out of action for 
a time, and I suppose I went to the Elevated 
station and took my ticket and got down at the 
other end and walked into the Zoo quite auto- 
matically. At least I cannot remember going 
there, or how, or why. It was a bright, glit- 
tering day and I was mooning about, passively 
enjoying the sunshine and thinking of nothing 
at all, when suddenly, coming from somewhere 
very close at hand, I heard a sigh. It was 
quite the most melancholy sigh I ever heard, 
as though it was the outcome of bearing the 
whole weight of the world upon some one's 
shoulders. *' 0-o-gh-h-o-o ! " it went, tailing 
away into a perfect infinity of weariness. " O- 
o-o-gh-o-o ! " 

Somebody was feeling pretty bad — that was 
obvious enough; who that somebody could be 
I had no idea. I was at the top of a little 
hillock, where four paths met; I could see 
round me clearly in every direction and there 
was not a soul in sight, man, woman or child, 
cat, dog or elephant. There was a bench-seat 
under a tree just behind me, and I found my- 

28 



A Baby in the Bronx 



self bending down to look under it in search of 
that mysterious misery. I was still bending, 
when I heard it again, more melancholy if pos- 
sible than before. It came from behind me 
that time and I jumped round as though I 
thought some one was going to hit me. 

In the angle formed by two of the paths was 
a low, wired enclosure, triangular in shape and 
about the size of a small room. The railing 
round it was not more than a couple of feet 
high and it was open to the sky, so it obviously 
did not contain any very savage or active beast. 
In the middle was a little round cemented pool 
and beside it, with its back to me, a low square 
wooden hutch. Evidently the sighing came 
from that. I had visions of finding a dying 
millionaire, kidnapped by toughs and left there 
to die, who, when I rescued him, would bless 
me with his last breath and press into my hand 
a purse containing several millions. I peered 
into the hutch just as another sigh came from 
it. 

It was not a millionaire, at all; it was a baby 
sea-lion and it was very unhappy because it was 

29 



A Vagabond in New York 

lonely. I knew that at once, because as soon 
as it saw me it came waddling out of its hutch 
and romped. If you can imagine a black 
sleeping sack, made of American cloth and 
rather badly packed, romping, you will know 
what it looked like. It had an old, old face, 
hundreds of years old, and it had a shiny bald 
pate and it had whiskers and a healthy mous- 
tache, and it was really glad to see me. I 
thought at first it might be hungry, but it had 
a sufficiency of food at hand. It was only un- 
happy and lonely and wanting its mammy and 
feeling horribly small and insignificant in a 
great, hostile world that it couldn't understand, 
and dying for some one to talk to. I was feel- 
ing like that, too, and so we made friends at 
once and I have never had a truer friend or one 
who greeted me with more unfailing gladness 
or was more unfeignedly sorry when I left him. 
It wasn't cupboard love either, for I never 
gave him anything. He never thought of of- 
fering me anything -^ or I might have accepted 
it gladly. I called him Chris, after a former 
friend, because their eyes were very much alike. 

30 



i 



A Bahy in the Bronx 



We could never quite decide which of us had 
most to put up with. Chris had more food 
than he wanted and I had liberty; he was al- 
ways longing to be back among the big waves 
and the ice-packs and I would have given a 
good deal to have some one to bring me my 
meals regularly. We had our loneliness in 
common. 

Chris never knew how much he meant to me 
— in the way of giving me something to think 
of beside my own troubles. I worked out at 
least five distinct schemes for carrying him off 
and setting him at liberty in the Hudson. I 
would have done it, too, had I felt certain he 
would benefit by the change. But at that time 
I was realising rather fully that there are worse 
things in this world than a regular position, 
with a regular income attached to it, even if it 
meant being chained to a desk, or forced to 
adapt a round body to a square hutch — so I 
didn't. I feel sorry, sometimes, even now, 
that my heart failed me. Chris was delicate, 
the keeper told me, and they scarcely expected 
to raise him, so I suppose he is dead now and 

31 



A Vagabond in New York 

out of his troubles. He was very good to me, 
he was. 

As long as my three dollars lasted I hung 
about the Bronx. It was bright, warm weather, 
and In the park and the woodlands round about 
it there was ample sleeping accommodation, 
and most of the daytime I spent talking to 
Chris — in a sort of dazed day-dream, not 
thinking at all, only feeling dimly that there 
wasn't anything particular to do or any partic- 
ular reason to do it. By about the fourth day 
I began to re-orientate my position. Chris 
had taught me that I was not the only person 
in the world who had his difficulties and grad- 
ually it began to come over me that my posi- 
tion was really very much better than his, be- 
cause he could not escape from his troubles, try 
how he would, and, if I would only try, I 
could. I waited until the Monday, because on 
the Sunday there were a great many people 
about, and we had very little chance of private 
talk together. On the Monday I bade him 
good-bye for the time, and he gave me all 
the encouragement he could think of, and as I 

32 



A Baby in the Bronx 



walked away down the little hill he stood up 
on his tail against the railing and looked after 
me and rolled his head from side to side as 
though he were trying to wave his handker- 
chief to me. 

It seems silly enough to look back to, but it 
felt uncommonly like saying good-bye to a 
friend. Some day, when I am very rich, I am 
going back to the Bronx Zoo — and if Chris is 
still alive I am going to buy him and take him 
back to somewhere In the Arctic Circle and 
there offer him the chance of his liberty. I 
don't believe he will, take it, somehow. 

I took the Elevated all the way down to the 
Battery, because it was so cheap, and I knew 
that there was the business end of New York, 
where I must look for a clerkship, or some- 
thing of that sort, for I was not particular. 
The sight of the shipping-ofEces at the Bowling 
Green made me wonder whether I should not 
be wise to get myself shipped back to England 
as a pauper immigrant. But somehow the idea 
didn't smile upon me, especially when I thought 
of Chris. I couldn't find any work — you 

33 



A Vagabond in New York 

wouldn't be surprised, If you could know how 
shabby I was or how vague about my acquire- 
ments — and that night I slept upon a bench 
in Union Square. 



34 



CHAPTER n 

On Sleeping Out 



I HAVE starved in three capitals — Lon- 
don, Paris, and New York — but I was 
never so depressed in my life as to hear, 
when coming home to the Embankment re- 
cently, of the absurd new system they have 
started there. To wake a man out of a com- 
fortable snooze and give him a ticket for a 
casual ward — as I understand is now being 
done — is to reduce starvation to an absurdity, 
to bring us all to the vulgar level of the small 

shopkeeper. 

Hitherto, for general eligibility, London has 
been but a little way behind New York in the 
matter of sleeping out. To Paris I have never 
been partial; it is too full of adventure for a 
quiet man. There are at least as many un- 
speakables in London or New York, but they 

35 



A Vagabond in New York 

are for the most part opportunist; your Apache 
of Paris is a sportsman. There may be twenty 
thousand night-birds in either English-speaking 
city who would cut your throat for half-a- 
crown, but the half-crown is to them a neces- 
sary incidental. Without it you are safe from 
anything more than horseplay. But your 
Parisian murders from the sheer joie de vivre. 
You are to him no more than a head of game 
and the state of your pockets immaterial. I 
have known a man to be killed on the Boule- 
vard de Clichy at three in the morning for not 
possessing a box of matches. And if you con- 
sider the kind of matches obtainable In Paris 
you can realise the significance of such an In- 
cident. 

Compared with, say, Madison Square, I have 
always found the Embankment rather depres- 
sing. The company does not seem able to 
forget that It Is under a cloud. It Is down and 
out; it refuses to be proud of it. I am not 
sure that the coming of the all-night trams has 
not done something to Improve this, by Intro- 
ducing a certain bustle; but at the same time it 

36 



On Sleeping Out 



has diminished the chances of really refreshing 
sleep, chiefly because of the absurd arrange- 
ment of the roadway, by which groaning Jug- 
gernauts are made to rush by within a foot of 
your head. The police, too, have always been 
needlessly officious — perhaps as being under 
the immediate eye of New Scotland Yard. 
They manage these things better in New York. 

There are three very good sleeping-out cen- 
tres in New York — Madison Square, Union 
Square, and City Hall Park. They are strung, 
like beads on a rosary, at convenient distances 
along Broadway, so that if you get bored in the 
one, it is not too far to stroll along to another. 
There are other possibilities, of course — the 
Bronx, to which I have already referred. Cen- 
tral Park, or the Battery. But they are too far 
from the centre of things to be convenient. 
Central Park, again, is too lively — almost as 
bad as Hyde Park — and there Is something 
suburban about it in suggestion. Personally, 
I would as soon sleep out on Turnham Green. 

Each of my three chosen squares has its pe- 
culiar advantages. The benches of all alike 

37 



A Vagabond in New York 

are well designed, with backs at the proper 
angle. They are In some ways better than 
those on the Embankment, where, If you hap- 
pen to get a corner seat, there Is an unpleasantly 
sharp metal rim to the arm — In Itself too 
sloping — which Is awkward for your elbow. 
On the other hand, although you are In some 
danger of slipping off, the London design fits 
the small of the back, which New York Ignores. 
As for Paris, you might as well try to sleep on 
a tombstone for any comfort you will get out 
of It. 

City Hall Park Is lively, Union Square is 
reposeful, Madison Square faintly aristocratic. 
City Hall Park has the newspaper offices, and 
IS the best for a night when you are not sleepy 
and wish to be amused. My favourite pitch 
is the ring of benches round the fountain op- 
posite the General Post Office. In hot weather 
little boys abound there, who use the basin as 
an open-air swimming bath at all hours, usually 
jumping In fully dressed — for what It implies 
— and having pleasant skirmishes with the not 
too officious police. The east side of Union 

38 



On Sleeping Out 



Square is quiet and well wooded — excellent 
when you are really tired; Madison Square, for 
some reason, attracts those who have seen bet- 
ter days. My last bench neighbour there was 
a British baronet, and dropped his aitches like 
a man. All three are open and free, without 
annoying railings or gates, well lighted by 
strong arc lights, with drinking fountains handy 
and lavatory accommodation fair for New 
York, where it is, generally speaking, abomi- 
nable. All are on the main street-car lines, 
which run, however, discreetly after midnight, 
and thus are cheerful without being intrusive. 
The company is delightful: optimists to a 
man and woman. I have talked to a hoary 
patriarch of, I suppose, seventy-five. He said 
he had not slept in a bed for ten years, and I 
believed him. Yet his whole conversation was 
on the best location for a motor works. He 
had invented, and had in his pocket, an entirely 
new system of electrical ignition — I am not an 
expert on these things — and when I left him 
he was figuring out the precise number of mil- 
lions he would make when the factory was 

39 



A Vagabond in New York 

working at its full capacity. Every one has 
some scheme or other, and is quite ready to 
share it with you. The last time I slept in 
Union Square I was offered a partnership in 
one which I believe really had something in it. 
Some of the Elevated stations up-town are high 
above the streets over which they run — espe- 
cially about the Cathedral Parkway — and they 
are approached from the roadway by long iron 
staircases, roofed in, so as almost to resemble 
tunnels. My neighbour's idea was to arrange 
a private company of three, two to hold up 
passengers — drunkards preferred — on their 
way down to the street, the third to keep watch. 
The working hours were from midnight to 
four in the morning and the probable returns 
magnificent. I did not accept the offer — as a 
matter of fact, before I had really time to con- 
sider it, I received another, which struck me as 
more promising, though, in the end, I did not 
accept that either. At least it is a fact that I 
never had such an offer on the Embankment; 
and now that they have turned it Into a sort of 
annexe to the casual ward, I never shall. 

40 



CHAPTER III 

Thieves' Kitchen 



F 



,EW things have made me reahse more 
fully Man's superiority to the Beasts 
that Perish — I except Chris because 
he is my friend — than my own adaptability 
to circumstances. Granted the transportation 
of a lion to the Arctic Circle and I am ready 
to believe that in four or five generations he 
will evolve for himself the fur, claws and anat- 
omy of a walrus, a Polar bear, or whatever 
other beast meets him half-way upon the path 
towards fitness. Mankind, if I am any ex- 
ample to go by, would reach the same point in 
four or five days. When I parted company 
with Mrs. Isaacs and my portmanteau I had 
all the prejudices of those born to the ringing 
of bells, as compared with those fated to the 
answering of them. It was certainly not the 

41 



A Vagabond in New York 

first time the wolf had curled himself upon my 
hearth-rug, but such earlier experiences differed 
in that they lacked the element of finality, that 
in every case the certain hope remained that 
either by coaxing or compulsion the wolf could 
sooner or later be expelled. But, as I sat on 
the benches of Union Square, it was unpleas- 
antly brought home to me that the case was 
altered. Fortune, at whom I had so long 
made faces, was showing herself suddenly apt 
at the same game. No longer could I ring 
bells; I had not even the chance of answering 
them. Not only was I hungry, but gazing 
ahead I could see nothing but an eternity of 
empty stomachs. I was become, in earnest, the 
vagabond I had sometime played at being. 

Within three days I adapted myself, un- 
consciously, to my new conditions. I gazed at 
a new world with new eyes and from a new 
angle. No longer was a policeman to me a 
henchman; he was become the Giant Corcoran, 
lord of dread powers, the more awful that 
their limits were to me unknown. No longer 
were clean faces and white linen the normal 

42 



Thieves' Kitchen 



setting for humanity; they were mere abstract 
ideas, to be regarded from afar, lacking in ac- 
tuality. I lounged upon my bench as though 
to the manner born, as though I had lounged 
there for long centuries, as though I had done 
nothing else this side the Blue Chamber of 
which Mr. Maeterlinck has told us. Then It 
was that the Tempter — as I am sure he would 
love to believe himself — came to me. 

Not an hour after I was offered the chance 
of holding-up belated passengers on the Ele- 
vated came my Introduction to the thieves' 
kitchen. I was sitting at the end of the bench 
nearest the central arc-light. I was sitting 
there the more easily to read, In a stray copy 
of the Journal, an article detailing the mil- 
lions paid for a famous blue diamond, reputed 
to bring bad luck to its possessor, which yet had 
recently changed hands. There the Tempter 
found me. He was a small man, shabbily 
smart, and he told me that he was English. 
Then he sat down on the bench beside me — it 
was a little after three in the morning — and 
we chatted together, as one does on the 

43 



m 



A Vagabond in New York 

benches of Union Square, without any formal 
introduction. He asked me several questions. 
He asked me if I was English and up against 
it, and I said I was both. Then he asked me if 
I would like to make some money, and I said 
there was nothing I should like better, except 
to have some given me. Then he asked if I 
was a University man and I said yes, but not of 
an English University, only German. He was 
a little disappointed at that, I could see, so I 
told him that I had a cousin who was at Balliol 
and who often let me speak to him. That 
cheered him up considerably and he said that if 
I liked to walk with him as far as Second Ave- 
nue it might be worth while. I was getting 
horribly tired of my own company by that time, 
so I went gladly. 

We went into a saloon just off the avenue. 
We went in through the Family Entrance and 
into a sort of lobby lined with mirrors and 
through one of the mirrors, which were fitted 
so neatly together that you couldn't see any 
doors, into a little private room. There were 
two ladies and two gentlemen, and my friend 

44 



Thieves' Kitchen 



the Tempter introduced me to one of the gen- 
tlemen, whose name was Mr. Birmingham. I 
am not using real names, of course, but they 
are near enough. Mr. Birmingham was what 
they would call in New York a near-gentleman, 
so near that you could scarcely tell the differ- 
ence by artificial light. He was a good fellow, 
too, because when he asked me what I would 
take to drink, and I said I would much rather 
have something to eat, he was quite nice about 
it and sent out for a cold lunch of sliced sau- 
sages and dill pickles and crullers and things 
like that, and very glad I was to have them. 
Meanwhile he introduced me to his friend, 
whose name was O'Fallon and who was too 
shiny to be quite convincing, and to the two 
ladies, who only had given-names and for some 
reason, as soon as I spoke to them, began to 
laugh until they cracked their complexions. 
One of them was rather pretty and both were 
more fashionably dressed than seemed abso- 
lutely necessary. However, they were kind 
enough to say that I was some boob, or Rube, 
I am not quite sure which, as they were laugh- 

45 



A Vagabond in New York 



ing so much, which I took to be complimentary. 
Mr. Birmingham, also, seemed struck with my 
appearance and intimated to the Tempter, 
whose name I gathered was Tripper, that he 
thought I should do. Then he asked me what 
my line was and I said that I was a teetotaller, 
which I wasn't, only I thought It seemed an ap- 
propriate thing to say and the two ladies 
laughed more than ever and one of them said 
that I was great. 

Mr. O' Fallon for some reason did not seem 
to like me. He was rather a surly person who 
kept on muttering to himself under his breath, 
and at last beckoned Mr. Birmingham out of 
the room, leaving me alone with Mr. Tripper 
and the ladies. Mr. Tripper didn't seem very 
pleased with me either, I thought. He whis- 
pered to me something about not trying to put 
it over them too much, or something of that 
sort. The ladies kept on laughing all the 
time. They were very merry souls. 

When Mr. Birmingham came back he got 
right down to business at once. He began by 
asking questions about my past career and fu- 

46 



Thieves' Kitchen 



ture prospects, which I answered as untruth- 
fully as was possible on such short notice. 
Then he asked if I had ever turned my thoughts 
towards bunco-steering or the green-goods 
game. 

I do not know If it is necessary to explain 
that bunco-steering is what is known in Eng- 
land as the confidence trick, and is worked by 
forcing your acquaintance on a complete and 
guileless stranger and so gaining his confidence 
in one of many ways, that you induce him to 
hand over to you all his valuables, wherewith 
you then decamp. You may see it in operation 
almost any day In or about the big Strand hotels 
where Americans mostly congregate. For 
some reason Americans seem about the only 
people ever taken in by It. I am sure I don't 
know why. 

The green-goods game consists In selling or 
pretending to sell forged United States bank- 
notes — " green-backs," whence the name — to 
persons with more greed than honesty. Of 
course you profess to be able to supply them 
very much under the usual rates — ten cents on 

47 



A Vagabond in New York 

the dollar is, I think, customary. Equally, of 
course, you haven't any forged banknotes to 
sell at all, and you simply trick your customer 
out of his money. The ingenious part of the 
*' game " is that, having himself embarked in 
a criminal business, he dare not afterwards 
prosecute you, and with any luck you can make 
further sums out of him in the way of black- 
mail. As you will understand, an appearance 
and manner of virtuous gullelessness is of great 
value in either of these " games," and I there- 
fore felt that Mr. Birmingham's question was 
distinctly flattering. 

He went on to point the moral by saying 
that being large and fat and fair, with a stupid 
face and an expression of blank idiocy, it struck 
him that Nature had cut me out for either — 
especially the first. I said that I had heard of 
them, but was not fully familiar with their de- 
tails. He explained them to me carefully and 
added that if I took a hand in either I might 
very soon expect to attain a high position. At 
first I should have to start in a humbler ca- 
pacity, merely to watch-out, when a game was 



Thieves' Kitchen 



In progress and make myself familiar with the 
faces of the slops who might be dangerous. 
Even so, he said, there was more dough to be 
made in a week than I could expect to earn in 
any other way in a year, supposing I ever man- 
aged to earn anything at all in New York. 
One thing only I must remember — and remem- 
ber always. Obedience to orders — obedience 
and again obedience. 

I am not at all sure that I should not have 
accepted the suggestion, had it not been for the 
presence of the ladies. As it was, it occurred 
to me that I should probably be expected to be 
on friendly terms with them and, somehow, I 
didn't feel like it. I doubted, too, whether I 
could ever really become intimate with Mr. 
O'Fallon. So I said I should like to think it 
over a little first. I said It with a certain diffi- 
dence, because I had visions, gained chiefly 
from the perusal of light literature, of being 
told to hold my hands up, knocked on the head, 
and dropped down a drain through a trap-door 
opening somewhere behind the fireplace. 
Nothing of the sort occurred. Mr. Tripper 

49 



A Vagabond in New York 

looked as if he was very sorry and Mr. O'Fal- 
lon looked as If he was very glad, and the two 
ladies laughed until the colour began to drop 
off their eyelashes, and Mr. Birmingham said 
that he could quite understand how I felt and 
that I could find him there any evening when I 
had made up my mind. Then we shook hands 
all round and I left them. 

That was my only real experience of profes- 
sional criminality In New York, and I feel my- 
self that It was more than a little disappoint- 
ing. If there had been only a pass-word or 
two, or a few oaths of inevitable vengeance if 
I played the part of traitor, I should have liked 
it better. But there was nothing of the sort, 
nor did I see so much as one revolver 
(technically known as " gun "), nor any masks, 
nor, Indeed, any of the properly romantic ac- 
cessories of crime. My friend Dempsey, who 
as a policeman himself should know something 
about it, told me later, when I discussed It with 
him, that Mr. Birmingham was probably 
brother-in-law to an Alderman and hand-In- 
glove with the superior officers of the police- 

50 



Thieves' Kitchen 



force and that, did I attempt to betray them I 
should very likely be knocked on the head, not 
by the Criminal Band, but by a police-lieutenant 
on a charge of D. and D. It is true that 
Dempsey is something of a cynic and may have 
exaggerated. I only know that such was my 
Introduction to the World of Crime and that 
if it Is lacking in romantic features it is not my 
fault. 

I had no regrets, for I got a square, If indi- 
gestible meal, out of It all, and just then I 
wanted one rather badly. 



SI 



CHAPTER IV 

The ''Cop'' and the "Copper" 

I FIRST met Dempsey — as I will call 
him — when I was looking for the 
Bread Line. I had heard of it as offer- 
ing the chance of something to eat, but I did 
not know its whereabouts. It was the second 
day after my interview with Mr. Birmingham 
and I happened to pass Dempsey, who was reg- 
ulating the traffic at the corner of Broadway 
and Union Square and I asked him. Broad- 
way belies its name at that point and the traf- 
fic was very heavy, but he found time to smile 
amiably, to ask me if I was up against it, 
and to lend me a pin, which I wanted urgently 
as I was unprovided with serviceable braces. 
Afterwards, in the intervals of dragging old 
ladies from under the wheels of street cars, he 
found more time to cheer me up, which I 

52 



The 'Top'' and the 'Topper' 



needed badly, to lend me fifty cents, which I 
needed more, and to tell me of a man who kept 
a delicatessen store on Sixth Avenue, and who 
needed an assistant. Officer Dempsey thought 
that if I said he had sent me, and that I could 
speak German, I might get the job. I did get 
it, and very interesting it proved, though that 
is beside the point for the present. 

I do not for a moment say that the New 
York police force spends all its time in prac- 
tising active benevolence towards needy foreign 
vagabonds, but this story happens to be true 
— and I have met nothing like it in London, 
Paris, Berlin, or Constantinople. No doubt 
Dempsey Is an exceptional man; possibly he 
judged that I was not quite such a hobo as I 
looked; at least to me he typifies the whole 
splendid force of which he is a member. And 
I never read a little ha'penny press attack upon 
that force without wishing to mobilise a few 
corner-boys, toughs and gunmen, and to make a 
clean sweep of the particular office from which 
it originates. There is only one other police- 
man with whom it is not an insult to compare 

53 



A Vagabond in New York 

the New York " cop " — the London *' cop- 
per," — and the comparison Is not altogether to 
the American's disadvantage, 

I suppose it is because the Police Universal 
sees so much of the realities that it is ubiqui- 
tously benevolent, so far as my experience goes. 
The policeman of Paris is benevolent and ineffi- 
cient; in Berlin, he is benevolent — yes, really 
— and officious; in Constantinople, benevolent 
and a fatalist; in London, benevolent and a 
snob; In New York, benevolent and a gentle- 
man. Given two drunken seafarers fighting 
in the street who refuse to desist when chal- 
lenged, the Paris policeman will pretend not to 
see them; the Berlin policeman will ring up a 
regiment of Uhlans; he of Constantinople will 
shrug his shoulders, cry aloud " Is this the will 
of Allah? " and proceed upon his beat with dig- 
nified aloofness. London and New York will 
alike arrest the combatants, or a dozen of them, 
single-handed, but London will consider 
whether they are admirals or deck-hands, and 
only use his truncheon In the latter case; New 
York will hammer either with equal joy. In 

54 



The ''Cop'' and the "Copper" 

other words, if you are unwillingly ragged be- 
yond reason, London will arrest you for inde- 
cency; New York will lend you three pins and 
a piece of string. I can vouch for this, because 
at a time when I only possessed one pair of 
trousers, and they split — but I need not go 
into that. I do not blame London ; the police- 
man merely honours the spirit of his nation; 
but so it is. 

Granted, as I honestly believe, that the New 
York " cop " is, man to man, so nearly on an 
equality with his London brother, why is it that 
he gets all the kicks and his brother all the 
ha'pence? Simply because the Londoner is 
well officered, well supported, and sufficiently 
numerous; the New Yorker is none of these 
things. He suffers for the faults of his bet- 
ters. I say this, not on my own authority, but 
on the strength of many facts, which I have 
seen and noted, and upon which Dempsey and 
his colleagues have commented with refreshing 
frankness, in my hearing. 

There are at least as many — Dempsey says 
twice as many — criminals of the lowest type 

55 



A Vagabond in New York 

in New York as in London, Paris, and Berlin 
put together. I do not remember the exact 
figures, but there are fewer policemen in New 
York than in either. The " scum of South- 
eastern Europe," as President Wilson truth- 
fully and rashly called them — and thereby 
risked a heavy loss of support during the re- 
cent presidential campaign — arrive in New 
York year after year in ever-increasing num- 
bers, and stay there. The police force remains 
stationary, or nearly so. What is more, the 
policeman runs serious danger in arresting 
them, not from them but from his superiors. 
The magistracy is selected by and subservient 
to certain corrupt politicians of Albany and 
New York, whose personal retinue, for election 
and other purposes, is largely composed of 
gunmen and foreign criminals generally. Ar- 
rest a notorious criminal in the act, and as often 
as not, though you bring fifty witnesses of un- 
impeachable standing, he will be acquitted 
without a stain on his character. Let me 
again emphasise that these words are not my 
own, that the facts may not be as Dempscy 

56 



The "Cop" and the "Copper'' 

believed. At least they are as he told them 
to me. 

Such a state of things does not induce effi- 
ciency. Neither does the existence of the 
Mayor — as Mayors are understood in New 
York. It is perhaps worst when the Mayor is 
a politician; it is very little better when he is 
a reformer, which is to say a crank. In my 
time he was a senile person called Gaynor, 
with an itch for popularity and designs on the 
Presidency which, I am happy to think, came 
to nothing. In the case of any law which he 
thought unpopular he had a pleasant little 
habit of writing to the papers to the effect that 
he hoped the police would turn their blind eyes 
towards any breach of it. And the Mayor has 
more power over the police than has any Chief 
Commissioner. New York again, in common 
with the rest of America, is. ridiculously over- 
lawed — with absurd little laws that are merely 
vexatious and do no good to anybody. Any 
crank with money and influence — which is the 
same thing — at Albany, the State Capital, can 
get any measure passed that he pleases — if he 

57 



A Vagabond in New York 

will but pay enough. Most of such laws are, 
of course, unworkable and unworked; they are 
nevertheless included, which is to say confused, 
with those really necessary to the public safety 
and convenience. The unhappy policeman has 
always to consider whether in enforcing the 
written law he may not be breaking one unwrit- 
ten. I would not be a New York PoHceman 
for a very great deal ; I would very much rather 
borrow money from him. 

Of the immediately superior officers, cap- 
tains, lieutenants and the rest, we have been 
recently hearing so much that I need say little 
about them. I do not believe — neither does 
Dempsey, who knows what he is talking about 
— that the great majority of them are more 
corrupt than other men. Only — they all hap- 
pen to be human beings, and some of them no 
doubt inherit their first ancestor's little weak- 
nesses. We, after all, have had our own 
Piccadilly police scandals ^ — and there are fifty 
Piccadillys in New York, forty or so concen- 
trated in the one Tenderloin district. Do 
away with your politicians, your aldermen, your 

58 



The ''Cop" and the 'Topper'' 

people with a pull, and especially your cranks, 
and there will be no need to talk of reforming 
the New York Police. The " cop " is drawn 
from much the same class as is the " copper." 
He is better educated; he has similar ideas of 
duty and he is as efficient to carry them out. 
Give him half a chance and he will make 
Heaven — even out of New York. 

I know that this digression has little to do 
with my own vagabondage; but we hear so 
much, especially of course In England, of 
Dempsey's deficiencies and those of his officers 
that It seems only fair to remember that there 
Is another side to the picture. Whether or no, 
I am sure of one thing: if Dempsey dies before 
I do, when I arrive In Purgatory I shall find 
him there, directing the traffic, and I shall trust 
myself to his care with absolute confidence that 
he will shepherd me safely past the Infernal 
trap-doors. What Is more, he will be pro- 
moted Upstairs millions of years before most 
of those who now sit In judgment upon him. 



59 



CHAPTER V 

The Free and Enlightened 



SO far as I was ever an earnest politician, 
in New York or elsewhere, I became 
one through eating too much canned 
— or, as we should say, tinned — asparagus. 
It came about through my gaining the post of 
assistant to Mr. — I will call him Cholmondely, 
though his real name was very much more 
British and aristocratic — who kept a deli- 
catessen store on Sixth Avenue, above Forty- 
second Street. My friend Dempsey, when he 
recommended me, told me that Mr. Chol- 
mondely was a tightwad — and he was. He 
was an interesting combination, even for New 
York. His mother was Greek — a descendant 
of the Byzantine Emperors, as is every Greek 
in New York; his father was German — a de- 
scendant of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, 

60 



The Free and Enlightened 



as is every German in New York; and he was a 
Jew, and his name was Cholmondely, as I have 
said. He knew, because Dempsey told him, 
that I was " up against it." Dempsey lent me 
fifty cents, and it is always a pleasure to me to 
remember that however much I owed when I 
left New York I repaid him. Out of it I spent 
ten cents on getting my shoes polished, for 
dandy. It was really only five cents, but it was 
so long since I had had any money in my pocket 
that I slipped the guy a nickel — as we should 
say on the benches of Union Square — as a tip, 
and the accession of self-respect was worth it. 
Then I spent twenty-five cents on two collars 

— one must take some luggage on engaging 
new lodgings ; and ten cents on a shave — the 
barber called It a hair-cut and wanted fifteen 

— so that I had exactly a nickel left when I 
took up my new position. 

I hoped that Mr. Cholmondely would ad- 
vance me something on my first week's salary, 
but he was of another opinion. If I had man- 
aged to live so long without, he thought I 
could last out another week and be spared the 

6i 



A Vagabond in New York 

mortification of having to pay more than my 
salary back before I got it; which was log- 
ical enough. He liked the look of me, though, 
as he was kind enough to say, and he let me 
live on the surplus stock, on credit, for the first 
week. I spent my nickel on a loaf of bread, 
very good but painfully dear, and I made 
good on the surplus stock. It consisted of 
canned asparagus and sardines. If I live to be 
a hundred I never wish to see either of them 
again. They were bad enough separately; on 
the Thursday, having finished my loaf, I tried 
them together. On the Friday a dear little 
pantomime lady, who was engaged at a vaude- 
ville house in the next block, said that for a fat 
man I was the hungriest-looking boob she had 
ever seen and asked me to have a sandwich 
with her. I had six and without shame; I told 
Mr. Cholmondely next morning that she was 
a principal, and that her credit was good, and 
it passed off all right. I have nothing against 
Mr. Cholmondely; he allowed me to sleep in 
the space behind the counter for the first week. 
I think it was harder, but it was very much more 

62 



The Free and Enlightened 



respectable than a bench on Union, or even on 
Madison, Square. 

It was through Dempsey' — my good angel 
— that I became a politician, though I honestly 
think I should have held back If It had not been 
for the asparagus. 

I was alone In the store when Mr. Hawes 
came In. I had never before seen anybody 
who looked so prosperous. He had a big 
black moustache and a smile, a corporation, a 
diamond bosom-pin, and a cigar. He shook 
hands with me quite warmly and said he was 
glad to meet me. If you only knew what that 
meant to me! Then he said I was English. I 
hadn't had a chance to say a word, so I asked 
him how he knew. He said, because I dropped 
my altches. Englishmen always did. Then to 
my surprise he ticked me off In a little note-book 
and said that my name was provisionally Alf 
Cohnstamm, a native of Paterson, New Jersey, 
and that I was to call at O'Keefe's cafe on 
Avenue A when I was sent for. 

He was just bustling off when, I suppose, 
something In the voice with which I thanked 

63 



A Vagabond in New York 

him struck him as umisual. He looked at me 
rather queerly and asked me if I were a smart 
Aleck. I said that I did not know; that, from 
my name I imagined myself to be of Jewish 
descent. He still looked a little annoyed, so I 
smiled at him, and he relented and asked me if 
Mr. Cholmondely had not made me wise. I 
said that he had done his best — and that was 
really true, so far as the delicatessen trade 
goes. Mr. Hawes put his head on one side 
and shook hands again, quite warmly. They 
have a perfect mania for shaking hands in 
America. I have been told — though I do not 
know it for an actual fact — that as soon as you 
are born you celebrate the occasion by shaking 
hands with the accoucheur and that, if you are 
unlucky enough to be executed for murder — 
which you are not unless you are very unlucky 
indeed — you first shake hands with the elec- 
trician and the governor and the chaplain and 
the warders and the newspaper men, and tell 
them to be sure and drop in whenever they are 
passing. Anyway, Mr. Hawes shook hands 

64 




- ..."j^^ll.nf 



I was tu call al O'Keefe's cafe when 1 was sent for. 



The Free and Enlightened 



with me twice and then, when he had already 
got as far as the door, came back and shook 
hands for the third time and said that I had 
got to quit kicking his dawg aroun', and that I 
was a bright-eyed mother's darling, and then 
the bosom-pin steered the cigar out on to the 
sidewalk. 

When the chance came I asked Mr. Chol- 
mondely about it, and he told me that mein roll 
was not zhick zat it might not be zhicker, and 
zat ze old Tiger was gut enough for him and 
for me, too. 

A week later I was summoned to Mr. 
O'Keefe's cafe. Mr. O'Keefe was rather a 
bigger edition of Mr. Hawes, which was only 
natural, as he was a shade nearer the rose. 
His moustache and his smile and his corpora- 
tion and his bosom-pin and his cigar were all a 
shade bigger and ranker, and he told me that I 
was a Democrat. I liked him at once, because 
he had bulgy purple eyes that looked as if it 
was only by the exercise of marvellous self- 
restraint that they did not jump out of his head, 

65 



A Vagabond in New York 

and reminded me of Chris, whom I was long- 
ing to see again, only the fare to the Bronx 
was five cents. 

Mr. O'Keefe poured me out a chaser as he 
told me that I was a Democrat and he went on 
to say, with a chaser between each paragraph, 
that I was a fervent believer in 

Smith for Mayor 

'And Jones for State Attorney 

And some one else for something else. 

And so were Mr. Breitstein 

And Mr. Tuchverderber 

And Mr. Letztergrosschen 

And Mr. Mavrogordato 

And Mr. Ferrati 

And quite a number of other people 

And that I was all of them 

And that we were worth three dollars each 
for being what we were — a trifle under the 
usual rates because a large batch of emigrants 
had arrived a few days before and depressed 
the market. 

Between surprise and the chasers and the 

66 



The Free and Enlightened 



memory of the canned asparagus I believed 
everything that he told me. 

In due course Mr. Breitstein and Mr. Fer- 
rati and Mr. Mavrogordato and the rest of me 
all recorded our votes for Smith and Jones and 
the rest of the ticket. Incidentally, we made 
quite a lot of money out of our refusal to bolt, 
and I made up my mind to remain a Democrat 
for the rest of my life, or until the Republican 
rates became a shade less niggardly. I was 
glad of the money because, just about then, Mr. 
Cholmondely and I parted company and, until 
I got a job with the " movies " a month later 
I was rather badly unemployed. 



57 



CHAPTER VI 

Business is Business 



YOU have to pay ten cents in New 
York for a chicken sandwich, and it 
is usually made of turkey. You 
pay live cents for a ham sandwich, and you 
have no idea what it is made of. I was in the 
delicatessen trade in New York for three weeks 
— and I have my suspicions. For twenty-five 
cents you can have a club sandwich. That is 
made of toast and chicken-turkey and bacon, all 
hot and very good. It is well worth the extra 
expense, because the smell of the bacon dis- 
guises that of the chicken. American bacon is 
not good; it is nearly always sold in glass bot- 
tles, as we sell jam, which prevents its getting 
away. I prefer its flavour to that of delicates- 
sen chicken, however, because I was in a hos- 
pital once and I hate being reminded of it. 

68 



Business is Business 



There are as many delicatessen stores in 
New York as there are wine-shops in Paris or 
tailors in the City of London. To millions of 
good New Yorkers the most dazzling kind of 
orgy is to spend the evening in a cinema theatre, 
which costs five cents, and then go to a delicates- 
sen store and have a ham sandwich. For the 
rest of the week you live upon dill pickles. 
Dill pickles are what we call gherkins, and they 
are far and away the most popular article of 
food in New York. You can get one for a 
cent; a really big and juicy one, which will do 
you for breakfast, with a bit Over for lunch, 
costs two cents. The people of New York are 
simple and long suffering; the existence of the 
delicatessen store is the proof of it. In no 
other trade in the world can you make so large 
a profit with so little ruth. I should be in the 
trade now — and perhaps a millionaire — if it 
had not been for a chicken. 

They sell chickens by the barrel in New 
York — wholesale, I mean — for much the same 
reason that they sell bacon in bottles. I was 
keeping store one day when Mr. Cholmondely 

69 



A Vagabond in New York 

came in In a state of great excitement. He had 
just heard of three barrels of chickens to be 
got at a bargain. They belonged to a big 
storekeeper, in a fashionable district up-town, 
who had quarrelled that morning with the In- 
spectors' Association — of which I will tell you 
more in a minute. As the result, they had to 
be sold at once, after being, I dare say, ten 
years in the family, and considered heirlooms. 
Mr. Cholmondely was anxious to get them be- 
fore rival traders could hear of them. He 
didn't want to appear in the deal himself for 
political reasons, so I was to rush up at once 
and secure them. I forget the actual figures, 
but supposing the market price in the ordinary 
way would have been twenty dollars, I was to 
give three. It took me four hours bargaining 
and two interviews with the local Rabbi, but in 
the end I got them for three dollars and fifty 
cents, and Mr. Cholmondely very kindly of- 
fered to share half the loss with me. He 
even said he was pleased with me, and he 
showed it. I asked him if he would let me 
have a little money; I said I wanted to buy a 

70 



Business is Business 



collar. He wouldn't give me any money, be- 
cause he said New York was full of tempta- 
tions, but he very kindly offered me the loan of 
a used collar of his own, which he thought 
would pass for another day or two if I chalked 
it over in places; and when we found it wouldn't 
fit, he said I could take as much packing paper 
or string as was needed to eke it out and pay 
nothing. 

There never was such a busy afternoon as 
we had when those chickens arrived. It meant 
no end of arithmetical calculations to start 
with, because to the cost of the chickens you 
had to add that of the chemicals, then to de- 
duct the share of the value of those chickens 
that were so irretrievably gone that they could 
only be used for sausages or club sandwiches, 
next add the percentage of the inspector's fee, 
and finally average the whole thing over each 
chicken. We worked it out at a little over 450 
per cent, profit. 

We were in the middle of adapting the 
chickens to their new life; I was wearing the 
oxygen mask and coaxing them out of the bar- 

71 



A VagahoTid in New York 

rels, and Mr. Cholmondely standing by with a 
club in case they turned nasty and attacked me, 
when the inspector came in. It worried me for 
the moment, and I wondered whether my em- 
ployer would try to pass the barrels off as a 
soap-works or patent manure or something. 
He didn't, though. He handed the inspector a 
cigar, calculated to dominate even those chick- 
ens, and asked him to wait a bit. When he 
was ready he got a ten-dollar bill out of the 
cash register and handed it to him, and the in- 
spector walked out. Mr. Cholmondely ex- 
plained to me afterwards how these thh.gs are 
done in New York. There is an association 
of dishonest traders and another of dishonest 
inspectors — Inspectors of Nuisances I sup- 
pose we should call them over here — who 
regulate the amount of graft to be paid for 
each visit. (I don't mean to Imply that there 
are no honest traders or honest Inspectors 
either — but Mr. Cholmondely did not tell me 
about them. He was not interested in them.) 
In my time it worked out at ten dollars a visit, 

72 



Business is Business 



which was very moderate, considering that the 
trader can do anything he chooses in the way of 
selling rotten food, besides getting valuable 
hints as to the best kinds of preservatives and 
anti-stink chemicals and so on. If there is any 
dispute the associations settle it, and their word 
is final. If an inspector kicks he is bounced, 
and if a trader does he is prosecuted, and the 
newspapers marvel over the efficiency with 
which the people of New York are protected 
from the dangers of bad food. The system 
works admirably, and on the very few occasions 
it has broken down it has been almost entirely 
due to the mistakes of new assistants fresh from 
Europe, who do not understand business. 
For which reason Mr. Cholmondely explained 
that if ever a would-be assistant told him he 
was an honest man, he turned him down at once. 
He did not believe in taking risks, he said. I 
felt quite glad it had not occurred to me to lie 
to him. 

We parted in the end over those same chick- 
ens. Mr. Cholmondely wanted me to take out 

73 



A Vagabond in New York 

part of my salary in club sandwiches, which he 
said I could eat at any time, and so not waste 
time over my meals. I had turned vegetarian 
by that time, and so I left. 



74 



CHAPTER VII 

Among the "Movies' 



I SUPPOSE there must be at least twice 
as many British baronets in New York 
as In London. I have foregathered 
with three in one night on the benches of Mad- 
ison Square, where they mostly sleep. I have 
been told, though I cannot vouch for this, that 
on any fine afternoon hundreds of them may be 
seen in the Central Park Zoo, hungrily looking 
on while the animals are fed. In comparison, 
the sprinkling of honourables is but small, and 
in all my experience I met with but one peer. 
He was, when in employment, a collector for 
worthy causes, and he frankly admitted that his 
title was only assumed for philanthropic pur- 
poses. Next to the baronet the army captain 
holds pride of place. He has Invariably 
served either In the Guards or the Lancers. I 

75 



A Vagabond in New York 

never met a British officer of any other grade 
or arm sleeping out, though I was for a few 
days on intimate terms with a field-marshal, 
who practised, I was told later, what would in 
London be known as the " kinchin lay " — steal- 
ing nickels from small children who had been 
sent on errands. He was, however, only a 
Cuban, and it was doubted in our set whether 
he really had the right to any rank higher than 
General. 

When the New York press caricatures, in- 
tentionally or otherwise, the British aristocrat, 
it always represents him as being prejudiced 
against the letter " H." So widespread is this 
belief that when the Duke of Connaught, some 
time since, visited New York, those notabilities 
who saw any prospect of being presented to 
him spent hours beforehand practising aitch- 
lessness, with the kindly desire to make him 
feel thoroughly at home. If you had met as 
many exiled British baronets as I have, you 
would understand the origin of this belief. 
When for a time I assumed a baronetcy I 
never could understand why the simplest- 

76 



Among the ''Movies' 



minded landlady recognised me at once for an 
impostor. Not until I had for three weeks 
acted as joint-assistant with another man of title 
to an Italian who kept a peanut stand at the 
corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Ave- 
nue did I discover that it was because I had not 
the proper accent, or perhaps I should say 
" eccent." When I say assistant, I should ex- 
plain that the Itahan was fond of his glass, and 
that Sir Alured — I mean my colleague — and 
I used alternately to mind the stand in his ab- 
sence, and be rewarded with from two to three 
cents-worth of peanuts, according to time and 
business done. Peanuts are very satisfying, 
and for some time I lived literally on nothing 
else. Then I heard that it was forbidden to 
feed them to the squirrels in Central Park — 
because they were supposed to give them mange 
— so I decided to try a change of diet. 

It was after I resigned my post in Mr. Chol- 
mondely's delicatessen store that I went into 
the peanut trade. I should probably, with any 
luck, have had a stand of my own by this time 
had I not one day run up against a former cus- 

77 



A Vagabond in New York 

tomer, Miss Lamartine, as I will call her, of 
the vaudeville stage. She was the nice girl who 
had regaled me with sandwiches in Mr. Chol- 
mondely's store, and when she heard that my 
whole worldly wealth consisted of three collars 
which I carried about in my pocket until I could 
afford to have them washed, she suggested that 
I should get work with the " movies." She 
was doing so already, and thought she could 
help me towards being taken on by the same 
people. I didn't quite know what " movies " 
were. I thought they had something to do 
either with the furniture trade or woollen un- 
derwear, but I jumped at the offer, especially 
when she told me it was worth three or even 
five dollars a day. 

Theatre folk are proverbially generous, in 
New York as elsewhere. When we decided 
that my clothes were not calculated to inspire 
confidence, she took me to a former colleague 
who roomed on the East Side. As he had no 
more money than had she, he very kindly of- 
fered to lend me his only suit, which was ex- 
tremely smart, in which to call upon the 

78 



Among the "Movies' 



Schutzenheimer Film Company — staying in 
bed until I came back. What he would have 
done if I had not come back, I tremble to 
think. I am glad to say, for the credit of Eng- 
land, that I resisted temptation. His clothes 
fitted me quite sufficiently well, considering my 
nationality — the average New Yorker has a 
prejudice against English tailoring, preferring 
something In which he can wrap himself five- 
fold against the cold blast of adversity — and 
I got the job. 

The American stage Is largely recruited by 
English actors who cannot make a living at 
home. When the English actor in New York 
falls In the legitimate — as Is not Infrequent — 
he recruits the " movies." There were many 
of him in the Schutzenheimer Company — 
along with a sprinkling of baronets and army 
captains. 

I do not think I ever enjoyed a week more; 
there was only one drawback — a serious one It 
Is true — the necessity of getting up at six in 
the morning. The Schutzenheimer studio was 
on the other side of the Hudson and work 

79 



'A Vagabond in New York 

started at eight. They were doing a film of 
strong moral purpose that week, showing the 
evil results of gambling. In one scene the 
gambler wandered into a wood, I don't know 
why, and there fell asleep. A pitched battle 
took place over him between a legion of devils 
and his guardian angel. I was one of the dev- 
ils, although the producer considered me rather 
stout for the part. I know I made an effective 
devil; my costume was black and skin-tight, and 
I wore horns and tail. The place where we 
did our scene was in the woods, about three 
miles from the studio. We went there ready 
made up, in the company's auto, and it broke 
down, so that we had to walk back. Miss 
Lamartlne, who was the angel, and I got sepa- 
rated from the others, trying to find a short 
cut through the woods. After wandering for 
something like an hour we came across a row 
of unfinished houses. That part of New Jer- 
sey is In process of being developed as suburbs, 
so that unfinished roads and virgin forest are 
mixed up in the queerest way. We saw a 
workman doing something outside the last 

80 



Among the ''Movies' 



house, and I went up to ask him the way. As 
soon as he saw me he went down on his knees 
and explained that he had only taken such a 
little drop that it could hardly be considered 
backsliding at all, and that if I would only let 
him off this time he would never touch another 
drop as long as he lived. When Miss Lamar- 
tine came up, all in white with golden wings 
behind her, he began to weep with joy and 
gratitude that his prayer had been answered. 

It was my own fault that I did not stay with 
the Schutzenheimers. I found, though, that 
the only way I could get up early enough to 
catch the seven o'clock ferry boat was by sit- 
ting up all night beforehand. One of the men 
in the company gave me an introduction to a 
man who had a booth at Coney Island, opposite 
Luna Park, and wanted a Hindu magician in a 
hurry. The pay was less than I was making, 
but I didn't have to start work till three in the 
afternoon, so I applied for the place and got it. 



8i 



CHAPTER Fill 

Coney Island 



I 



F you take Earl's Court, Shepherd's Bush, 
Blackpool, Douglas, I. O. M., and the 
Hammersmith Broadway on a Saturday 
night ; arrange them along both sides of a street 
a little broader than Kingsway and perhaps 
three times as long, and a multitude of little 
alleys, for footpassengers only, leading from 
it to the sea; set the whole down somewhere 
beyond Shoeburyness in the Essex Marshes and 
fill up the space between It and London with 
unfinished suburbs of the cheaper kind — say 
Cricklewood, only built of wood instead of red 
brick — you will have a very faint approxima- 
tion of Coney Island, where I was for a time 
a Hindu magician. 

In the elaborate works of art which covered 
the front of the marquee wherein I performed 

82 



Coney Island 



my miracles, I was pictured as a high-caste 
Brahmin. I was also represented as having a 
long white beard and as sitting on a carpet sur- 
rounded by Oriental hourls. In actual fact I 
had no beard and there was a distressing lack 
of hourls. Instead, there was a bearded lady 

— quite genuine and rather pathetic, seeing that 
she powdered the upper part of her face with 
an eager earnestness that overran Its purpose — 
a lady with four legs, the thinnest man on earth, 
the most despondent giant — or so I suppose 

— on earth; two horribly deformed negresses, 
described as bear-women, and a snake-charmer, 
reputed Oriental, but not answering the descrip- 
tion of a houri. 

We were displayed upon platforms ranged 
round the Interior of the marquee, each about 
the size of a large dinlng-table ; and at ten-min- 
ute Intervals a lecturer came round and de- 
scribed us to those members of the public who 
paid a dime admission. From him they learnt 
that, as well as a magician and a Brahmin of 
the highest caste, I was a fakir and a guru. To 
be quite truthful I myself suggested to him that 

83 



A Vagabond in New York 

I should be a guru, and the idea appealed to 
him. We neither of us knew what the word 
meant — not, I hope, anything improper — but 
it had an Oriental atmosphere about it. I was 
the intimate of a long line of Viceroys; I had 
cured the late King Edward, Kaiser Wilhelm, 
and the President of the Swiss Republic of tic- 
douloureux in its most advanced stage; I had 
been visiting the western slopes of the Rocky 
Mountains in search of curative herbs, and, on 
my homeward journey to Mofusselbad, I had 
been prevailed upon, at enormous expense, to 
break my journey at Coney Island. My sal- 
ary was $12 a week and two meals a day, with 
the privilege of sleeping in the marquee at 
moments of financial stress, but this the lecturer 
did not mention. 

My more immediate purpose was to sell lit- 
tle bottles of toothache tincture at the reduced 
price of a dime each — never retailed to 
crowned heads at less than a hundred dollars, 
and then only to potentates in reduced circum- 
stances. Towards this end I had a turban, an 
olive complexion, a tom-tom, upon which I beat 

84 




From him they learned that, as well as a magician and 
Brahmin of the highest caste, I was a fakir and a guru. 



Coney Island 



with my fists at slack moments, and an Oriental 
prayer, which I intoned upon my knees, beating 
the floor with my forehead and raising my 
hands heavenwards alternately. It was a very 
good prayer, and had an excellent effect. It 
was a very good toothache tincture, too; I made 
it myself in full view of the audience, from a 
large white root that looked like cheese and 
smelt like a pig's idea of Paradise. I boiled 
it in a lotah — I called it a loofah several times, 
by mistake — over a charcoal brazier. I used 
to address the audience in flowery English — 
a really moving address, that had been written 
for Mr. Czartorisky, my proprietor, by a mem- 
ber of the staff of the New York American. 
As a rule, the audience were quite satisfied with 
it, but one evening a young gentleman of the 
kind ticketed in New York as a " smart Aleck," 
spoke to me in my native tongue. He had a 
young lady with him, to whom he loudly de- 
scribed me as a fraud, which annoyed me, con- 
sidering how hard I was working for my living. 
He said that he had lived for quite a time in 
Calcutta. The young lady suggested that he 

85 



'A Vagabond in New York 

should expose me, and he came forward for 
that purpose, while the crowd stood round ex- 
pectant. I felt the lecturer behind me tremble 
so that the platform shook, but I was not 
alarmed. I caught an appealing expression in 
the young man's eye more expressive than many 
marconigrams. Accordingly, when he spoke to 
me in unknown tongues, I replied to him in a 
variation of Hindu which surprised even my- 
self. We had quite a pleasant little chat, to 
the admiration of the beholders, after which I 
saluted him in English, as " Lord Sahib," and 
told him that he reminded me of Lord Curzon, 
who had bought two dozen bottles of my 
specific, and that I hoped he would do no less. 
He was quite a nice boy; he bought a dozen bot- 
tles there and then and gave me a five-dollar 
bill for them — at least a third of his weekly 
salary, I suppose. If you had seen the look 
in the young lady's eyes, though, you would 
have realised that it was well worth it to him. 
I salaamed to him as he turned away, purple 
with joy, and called him " Lord Sahib of all 
the Elephants "> — and the young lady kissed 

86 



Coney Island 



him even before they had left the tent. The 
rest of the audience cheered, and In about five 
minutes I had sold out my whole stock. They 
are simple souls, the Great American People, 
even simpler, I think, than the English. I will 
not say that they are without forethought, 
though. I had two written proposals of mar- 
riage the first week, and both Insisted that I 
should put away any other wives I might al- 
ready have In India. One lady added that I 
must never expect her to ride on a camel. 

We were really a very happy little family, 
and some of the supper-parties we used to have 
in the marquee after closing hours — which is 
to say about one In the morning — were perfect 
Agapes. Czartorisky, who was much too gen- 
erous ever to be a successful man, I fear, pro- 
vided the fare, which was always the same — 
beer, Frankfurters, and boiled corn. These 
are the staple dishes at Coney Island; there 
must be a thousand establishments, I suppose, 
devoted to the sale of " Domestic " Frankfurt- 
ers in Coney Island, not a very large number 
either, If you remember that In a successful sea- 

87 



A Vagabond in New York 

son they have crowds running into the seven 
figures in the course of a day, and that every 
one of them eats at least one Frankfurter. 

I was — and knew that I was — a fool to 
throw up such a job, but the truth of the 
matter was that I could not stand the Bear- 
women. I don't know that I am more squeam- 
ish than another, but there was something so 
horrible about their deformities that I used to 
squirm every time I saw them. I thought I 
should get used to it, but I didn't somehow, and 
in some extraordinary way they got to like me 
— they were sisters — and used to come and 
talk to me at odd moments. 

I stood it for three weeks — and that really 
was a continued act of heroism, although I 
say it myself — and then the lady with four 
legs began to discuss the works of Mr. Arnold 
Bennett with me — (this is quite true, although 
you will not believe a word of it) — and the 
combination was too much. I told Mr. Czar- 
torisky about it and he understood — he was 
a white man all through and a gentleman — 
and he introduced me, over a " clam-bake " 

88 



Coney Island 



dinner on the sea-front, to a business acquaint- 
ance, who ran one of the saddest little circuses 
you ever saw in your life. He said — and I 
really believe that for the moment he believed 
it himself — that I had a life-long acquaintance 
with the East Indies and was a natural-born 
mahout. I mention this because it shows that 
Mr. Czartorisky was a poet and an artist. His 
friend, whose name was Wolff, had an elephant 
— such a sad, pathetic little elephant, as you 
shall hear — named, of all names in the world, 
Gladys, and he was anxious about her health. 
He thought she was fretting — which was not 
at all unlikely considering that her mission In 
life was to balance herself ungracefully upon a 
large wooden ball and fit herself, disgracefully, 
into a chair and pretend that she was drinking 
champagne. So he engaged me as her attend- 
ant, to double the part, so to put It, with that 
of assistant-groom to Danny, who was a mule 
and was advertised as the strongest kicking mule 
In the world, with a standing offer of fifty cents 
to any member of the audience who should 
succeed In sitting him twice round the ring. 

89 



CHAPTER IX 

''Gladys'' 



IF I had been Mr. Wolff I do not think I 
should have engaged me to act as attend- 
ant to Gladys. Not, at any rate, to ap- 
pear publicly in that capacity. I freely admit 
that I am large, for my species — both in 
length and depth and width. Gladys, on the 
other hand, was distinctly small. She was an 
elephant all right, because she had a trunk. 
She was an African elephant, too, as her ears 
witnessed — although I have been told that 
African elephants are untamable. On the 
other hand, African elephants have large ears 
and, at the risk of being accused of exag- 
geration, I can only say that her ears were so 
large that, had she been only a foot or two 
smaller, and accustomed to hang upside down 
from one foot, she could easily have passed as 

90 



"Gladys" 

a bat. We got so fond of each other that I 
sometimes used to feel that I was unfaithful to 
poor Chris. 

I never became really intimate with Danny. 
For one thing he had a distorted sense of hu- 
mour and a long reach. He could kick all 
round him with each leg separately or all to- 
gether, and when he hit you he hurt. He was 
a consummate hypocrite. One particular trick 
of which he was very fond was to pretend that 
he was an amiable horse muzzling his nose into 
your pocket In search of a carrot. He didn't 
want any carrot in reality. He didn't like 
them. He very much preferred a plug of chew- 
ing tobacco. What he wanted was a bit of 
you, and when he had got that he would go off 
into a perfect volley of malicious laughter in 
case you should miss the point of the joke. I 
will say for him, though, that with all his little 
faults of character he was a conscientious work- 
man. Mr. Wolff might safely have offered 
five hundred dollars to whoever could ride him 
twice round the ring against his will; even a 
monkey couldn't sit him for two minutes and we 

91 



'A Vagabond in New York 



had one monkey, called Ipecachuana, who was 
the best rider I ever saw. It was really a 
pleasure to see Danny get to work. He would 
start with two or three harmless buckings, to 
give the enemy confidence. Then he would 
drop his head until his nose touched the sawdust, 
stand on three legs and use the fourth — it 
was immaterial which, though he got the pret- 
tiest action out of his off hind foot — as a rake 
or comb or whatever you like to call it. He 
would begin along one side, to stretch his 
muscles a bit and worry his rider, and he would 
gradually work upwards until there was not an 
inch of his own backbone, from withers to tail, 
that had not been explored by that extremely 
quick-action hoof. I haven't the least doubt he 
could have combed himself down the other side 
as well, if he had felt like it, but he never needed 
to. His enemy was always outside the ring 
by that time. 

He had the artistic temperament, had Danny, 
with all that it implies for good and evil. One 
way in which he showed it was his method of 
entering the ring. He was never the same in 

92 



"Gladys" 

any two performances, always altering and im- 
proving and experimenting towards the perfec- 
tion of his art. Sometimes he would adopt the 
despondent suggestion of a broken-down cab- 
horse, tottering sluggishly into the ring and 
standing there awaiting trouble — the other 
man's trouble — the very picture of despond- 
ency. He even used to keep his eyes shut — or 
that one which was towards the audience — to 
veil the red light of savage anticipation within 
them. Another time he would rush into action 
like an embattled volcano, eyes blazing, ears 
laid so far back that you could not see them, 
mouth wide open and every hair on his hide 
standing up in separate defiance. Then he 
would rollick round and round the ring, daring 
any one to come within five foot of his four. 

There was only one weak spot in Danny, re- 
garded in the light of a money-maker, and 
that was his independent spirit. Even in my 
limited period of acquaintanceship with him he 
three or four times played Mr. Wolff the nasty 
trick of pretending that he was a sheep. He 
would amble into the ring with an air of the 

93 



'A Vagabond in New YorJc 

sweetest reasonableness and there he would 
stand until a boy got on his back. Then, while 
we were all watching-out to catch the boy when 
the explosion should take place, he would sur- 
prise us by ambling gently round the ring, doing 
everything that his rider told him and finally 
standing still for him to dismount, with the 
expression on his hypocritical face of a well- 
trained butler conscious of having done his best. 
It used to annoy Mr. Wolff quite considerably; 
but it was really very good for trade, because 
It encouraged other boys to try their luck and 
he never did the ambling palfrey act twice In 
one week. 

It was as well that we had Danny to liven 
things up a bit; apart from him I suppose we 
were the most despondent sort of circus that 
ever tried to exist. And Gladys was the most 
despondent creature in It. Nature never In- 
tended her for a circus-performer; she ought to 
have been a nun, attached to some Order where 
she was allowed melancholy love affairs with 
consumptive young boy-elephants and given 

94 



"Gladys" 

stated hours for weeping over their early graves. 
Failing that she ought to have been a char- 
woman — or as we should say in America, a 
scrub-lady — with a husband who beat her, and 
eight children. She had very little hair, but 
she carried the permanent suggestion that she 
never put it up properly, only made it into an 
unkempt wisp when she got up in the morning, 
and left the rest to Providence. I always think 
of her now as wearing a rusty black bonnet with 
strings and as shedding tears. 

I never knew for certain, but I think she must 
have had an unhappy love-affair with the man 
who preceded me as her mahout. I think that 
he borrowed all her money, under promise of 
marriage and forgot to pay it back before he 
left. If it were so, I am not sure that the blame 
was altogether his. I think he must have been 
sorely tempted. Before I had known her three 
days she signified to me in the usual manner 
that her heart was mine alone and only mine. 
She used to put her trunk round my waist and 
whisper her troubles into my ear and when she 

95 



A Vagabond in New York 

felt sure that I was what the Italians would call 
simpatica, she tried to climb onto my knee and 
lean her head on my shoulder. 

I have never been able to make sure whether 
she suffered from stage-fright or was merely 
incompetent. Sometimes — about once in five 
attempts — she would go through her act quite 
perfectly; sit upon her chair, if not gracefully, 
at least solidly; raise herself up on end, plac- 
ing one foot on the table; ring her bell with a 
certain dignity and, when I brought her the 
Indian club wrapped in silver-foil that passed 
for her champagne bottle, drink from it at least 
as convincingly as you could expect from any 
untutored African ingenue. But — the odd 
four appearances could only be described as 
tragic fiascos. Either she would go on her 
knees and look at me out of the corners of her 
eyes — they were small and red and rather 
piggy — so appealingly that members of the 
S. P. C. A. who happened to be present would 
be stirred to instant action, or else she would 
seize her hand-bell, give it one tragic, despair- 
ing clang, attempt to drink out of it, as though 

96 



"Gladys" 

she thought it was her champagne bottle and 
then promptly lie down — a performance that 
was not expected of her until the end of her act 

— and refuse to get up, whatever the means of 
compulsion, until the five bears, introduced by 
the Signora Esmeralda, who was really Mrs. 
Wolff under another name, were half-way 
through their melancholy pretence at gymnas- 
tics. She would confide to me afterwards, as I 
led her to the canvas stable which she shared 
with Danny and the three pie-balds, and Senor 
Vivaldas' monkeys, and Joey the vulgar donkey 

— that she was a femme incorjipromise — her 
French was not very good — and that until 
Women got the vote — and things like that. I 
believe so, at least, because grief usually made 
her incoherent and she was feeling for bits of 
sugar — which she did not deserve — in all my 
pockets while she spoke. 

If Mr. Wolff had been the ordinary kind of 
circus-proprietor I should certainly have got the 
sack within a week of my enlistment under his 
banner. Fortunately for me — for I was very 
happy with him — he was not. His ambition 

97 



A Vagabond in New York 

was to be a minister. I know it sounds as if I 
were making this up, but I am not — ■ and any- 
one who performed at Coney Island in the 
spring of 19 12 can tell you so. He was 
quite a young man and he had studied theology 
somewhere in Mamaroneck, New York, and if 
he had not married, I think — from what I 
know of him — that he would be studying there 
now. 

Before her marriage Mrs. Wolff was a 
school-teacher. She was the niece of the orig- 
inal proprietor of the circus, but she was not 
on visiting-terms with him, because her mother 
held that circuses were immoral. Her hus- 
band agreed with her mother, and I have no 
doubt that she agreed with her husband and 
listened to his prosy arguments on the Whole 
Duty of Man with all the earnest-eyed adora- 
tion into which a really nice girl can persuade 
herself when she is in love. They had been 
married about six months — starving genteely, 
I suppose, most of the time — when the uncle 
died and left her the circus. Mr. Wolff would 
have flinched from the responsibility and at- 

98 



''Gladys" 

tributed his cowardice to high moral tone. 
Mrs. Wolff did not. She pointed out to him 

— of course I was not present, but so I believe 

— that if the affair were sold up at once it 
would bring in enough to support them — and 
a probable third person — for about a fort- 
night. If it were run as a going concern and 
with ability, enough might in the end be 
made out of it for him to be able to afford to 
enter the ministry. 

Mrs. Wolff was raised somewhere in the 
back-blocks of Vermont, which is to say that 
she was a young woman of New England; 
which is to say that she had ideas on the pro- 
prieties and the respectabilities and the de- 
cencies which you will find nowhere else In the 
world, except perhaps In parts of Surbiton and 
Croydon and the lower end of the Balham High 
Road. Wh^n I joined the aggregation they 
had been running it for just over a year, and 
she used to put five sad-eyed bears through 
their paces three times a day. They were 
dressed for soldiers and she wore a very smart 
vivandiere's costume and very pretty she 

99 



A Vagabond in New York 

looked in it She was not a good bear-leader. 
She has told me herself that she was horribly 
afraid of the bears at first, ragged and de- 
pressed and lacking in enterprise as they were. 
The costume outraged all her sensibilities, also 
— but she was up against it, and she meant to 
make good and she did. That was the sort of 
woman she was. The original Signora Es- 
meralda — I imagine that she was something 
of a hussy, though I never saw her — was re- 
ceiving thirty dollars a week and extras. 
When the concern changed hands she thought 
she saw her opportunity for blackmail and de- 
manded seventy-five. Mr. Wolff would have 
given It her, to save trouble. Mrs. Wolff got 
rid of the Signora at short notice, carried out 
some legal arrangement that vested in her the 
ownership of the dismal troupe and herself as- 
sumed the vacant leadership. 

I am not a New England school-marm, and 
I have no objection to fancy dress or the smell 
of sawdust, and I am not afraid of bears, at 
least of mangy, melancholy bears without a 
decent claw-stroke among them — so I cannot 

100 



"Gladys" 

myself realise all that it must have meant to 
Mrs. Wolff. But I can imagine it. It was not 
all she did either, by a long way. She had a 
very small pink son, called Tobias, and she used 
to mother him and see to all the business side 
of the affair, and run the staff and book the 
tours and make contracts for hay, and do a hun- 
dred other things as well. Her husband had a 
little canvas room just behind the stables and 
he spent nearly all his time in it. I think he 
used to pray there, and I know he was writing 
a book on the most profitable Way of Conver- 
sion, because as soon as he found that I had 
lived for a time in Wales — which is where all 
the best brands of religion come from nowa- 
days — he insisted on reading some of it to me. 
He was disappointed in me at first, because 
Czartorisky had — with the kindest intentions 
— given him the impression that during my 
long years of residence at Mofusselbad I had 
become slightly tainted with Buddhism, and he 
scented a shining reconversion. 

Mr. Wolff did not convert me to anything; 
Mrs. Wolff made me a feminist and a suffra- 

lOI 



'A Vagabond in New York 



gist and at Mrs. Pankhurst's service whenever 
she cares to call upon me. Even Gladys, who 
Is, I suppose, the most feminine creature with 
whom I ever foregathered, was never again 
able to rouse in me the Pride of Manhood. 
That was a good proof of the sincerity of my 
conversion because, disregarding the proprie- 
ties, we used to take exercise together on the 
sands of Coney Island in the very early morn- 
ing. We used to walk arm-in-trunk, picking 
our way among the thousands of New Yorkers 
who find there cheap sleeping-places during the 
warmer months. Gladys, holding the tip of 
her trunk so that I could not escape a word of 
it, used to open her heart to me — and even so 
I am still a suffragist, 

I remained associated with Wolff's Mam- 
moth Hippodrome and Concise Compendium 
of the World's Most Marvellous Miracles 
until it again changed hands. It happened not 
very far from a place called Montauk, which 
is at the furthest extremity of Long Island and 
quite a long way from New York, so I suppose 
that I ought not to include it in these remlnis- 

I02 



.1 



*,', 



03 










"en 



C 

o 
O 



C 



G 

o 



M 
O 



05 



0) 



(1) 

M 

3 



"Gladys" 

cences. As however the reader who has ac- 
companied me so far has already paid, I am 
not unduly worried. 

We were performing In a certain village, the 
name of which I will not mention, when Mr. 
Wolff got a call. I don't know how he got It, 
because I was down at the railroad depot at 
the time, seeing after a shipment of hay that 
had gone astray; and before I got back Mrs. 
Wolff had arranged everything, sold the whole 
concern over the telephone as It stood, settled 
all the bills, given us all formal notice, inter- 
viewed a doctor about some childish trouble — 
I think it was croup or convulsions or some- 
thing of that sort with which Master Tobias 
was experimenting — and was looking up the 
times of the boats from Montauk Point to 
somewhere In Connecticut where the call came 
from. 

She had grown quite fond of her bears by 
that time and felt she couldn't part with them, 
so she excepted them from the sale and took 
them with her. I often used to wonder what 
the congregation thought of them. 

103 



CHAPTER X 

Who's Got the Button?' 



I MIGHT have remained with the Com- 
pendium under the new proprietary, but 
somehow I did not feel anxious to do so. 
I was sorry to part with Gladys; I am bound 
to say that she showed few signs of grief at 
losing me, displaying instead, when I intro- 
duced her new mahout, a deeper interest in the 
contents of the new Amurath's pockets than in 
the farewells of the old. I do not blame her, 
the less so that when I again met with her, by 
chance, In Paterson, New Jersey, some months 
later, she indubitably recognised me — her 
trunk-tip darting as undeviatlngly towards the 
pocket in which I used to keep the sugar as 
does an arrow towards its goal. She was of a 
different temperament to Chris. On my re- 
turn to New York I paid him an early visit and 

104 



''Who's Got the Button?' 



he positively howled with delight on seeing me 
again. I very nearly did myself, so honours 
were easy. 

I had thirty dollars in my pocket when I 
parted brass-rags with the Wolffs, and quite an 
album of photo-postcards. It was characteris- 
tic that those representing Mr. Wolff all 
showed him in clerical guise; poring over a 
massive tome; raising his eyes heavenwards in 
ecstatic thought or, in one of which he was 
very proud, in prayer before a mahogany tall- 
boy — the shoe-heels rather larger than life 
owing to perspective difficulties. This last 
he autographed as " Rev. Meander S. Wolff." 
His wife preferred to be remembered in my 
mind in two alternative aspects — as Vivan- 
diere, putting her bears through their exercises; 
and as Mother, yearning over her first-born 
Y/ith that intensity, photographically sacred to 
maternity, which suggests the fear that the 
first-born is going to be sick and spoil the pic- 
ture. They were very good people, the 
Wolffs, and if I ever enter Heaven I shall ex- 
pect to meet him there. I am not so sure about 

105 



A Vagabond in New York 

his wife, because I know she will insist on tak- 
ing her bears with her and If any officious arch- 
angels are about, difficulties may result. Per- 
haps, though, she will succeed in passing them 
off as those that ate up the small boys who told 
the bald-headed prophet to go up. 

I decided to walk back to New York, because 
when you have money in your pocket you feel 
that it is unfair to others less happily situated 
to spoil the market. I had not gone twenty 
miles on my homeward way before I fell in 
love and stayed there — in situ I mean. I did 
not fall in love with one woman, but with two, 
I suppose I ought to be ashamed to say. 
It happened at Hopkins's, which is within a 
thousand miles of Good Ground, which is in 
Long Island and would be ideal were it not In- 
fested with golfers. Hopkins's stands In a 
wood a couple of miles away from the golfers 
and I have never seen a prettier place, nor one 
that more completely satisfied the desire occa- 
sionally felt, even by those of us who are vaga- 
bonds, for a place where one could really settle 
down and be at rest. Its first attraction to me 

1 06 



WJw's Got the Button? 



yf 



was a little nmnel of water, springing up out of 
nowhere and dimpling along over a natural 
carpet of grass. I was thirsty and I bent 
down to drink, and while I was drinking a large 
buck nigger fell upon me — literally I mean — 
out of a cherry-tree. He did not hurt me at 
all, but we rolled over and over together in the 
runlet, and in due course I held his head under 
it until I thought he was drowned — and then 
Sarah and Billy appeared. 

I didn't know who they were and they cer- 
tainly didn't know who I was, and as they came 
up to where I sat, vilifying my Maker, on the 
edge of the runlet, they held out fat podgy 
fists, rigidly clasped, towards me — and I 
am bound to confess, also towards the nigger, 
who was squattering on the bank like a 
wounded duck — and they said " Button — 
Button — Who's got the button ? " They said 
it in the queer little high-piped voice of child- 
hood that is sometimes an ecstasy and some- 
times an intolerable pain — according to what 
you have been doing for the last six months or 
so. 

107 



A Vagabond in New York 



I was not initiated about the button, but I 
felt it would be right to extend my hands as 
they did — and Sarah dropped something into 
my palm and pouted. " He's got the button," 
she said — and I certainly had, and it was evi- 
dently part of the game that if you had the 
button you lost the game. It was a little white 
button. I have still got it. 

Sarah was two and a half and Billy was a 
year older, and they had ordered Jake, who was 
the nigger, into the cherry-tree to pick them 
cherries. And because they were Billy and 
Sarah he had gone, although it was weeks after 
the last cherry had been picked — and if you 
had been there you would have done the same. 
Billy, let me say, was a young lady. She it was 
who continued the conversation. " I said 
something very funny just now," she confided 
to me, with a shade of abruptness in her man- 
ner. 

I suppose I looked interested, for she did 
not wait for a reply. " I said Dod," she ex- 
claimed. " And it means, ' Tumble ri^ht 
down.' " 

io8 



Who's Got the Button? 



}y 



As I have already said I do not know that 
I am partial to babies. As a rule I prefer 
elephants, because you are not afraid to lecture 
them if they annoy you. But I certainly did 
like Billy and Sarah. They were not babies, 
for one thing, they were whole millions of 
years old — you had only to see them walk to 
be sure of it. They always walked together, 
hand-in-hand rather stiffly and with a certain 
care. They were not particularly pretty — as 
I have been told by neighbouring mothers — 
but they had little twiny fingers that used to 
twist round yours very trustfully, and big round 
eyes that when they caught yours used to make 
something click inside you, and I know in 
my heart, although he never admitted it, that 
Jake tumbled from the cherry-tree on top of 
me — although he saw that I was white and 
large and that trouble would ensue — because 
he thought that it would make them laugh. It 
did not — I never knew them to laugh except 
at Inward thoughts of their own which they 
never shared with mere mortals — but it was 
worth the risk. I did much more absurd 

109 



A Vagabond in New York 

things myself before I had done with them — 
and I am a very clever man and they no more 
than farmer's brats. I forget if I mentioned 
that I have got that button still. 

I wasn't a hobo just then, and I was not 
looking out for the chance of doing " chores " 
but I really had no say in the matter. They 
walked very stiffly, one on each side of me 
— as I suppose the angels do when you are 
trying to dodge Saint Peter — and after ex- 
actly ten steps, as if they were doing it to 
signal, each took one of my hands — they 
had soft little fingers, as I have said, of the 
sort that make you wish you had married de- 
cently twenty years ago and had a safe job in 
a bank. We made a little procession — Jake, 
who was already murderously jealous, follow- 
ing behind — to an old frame house that was 
covered over from roof-tree to ground with wis- 
taria boughs. It stood in a little grove of its 
own, all wedged In among bright flowers, most 
of them purple and blue, with a very strong sun- 
light shining down on them, and brown fields 
and woods just thinking about getting golden. 

no 



Who's Got the Button?' 



We went in by a back door — it was none of 
my doing — and just before we entered I half 
turned my head for some reason that I don't 
remember, and I saw a blue vision of sea slither 
up among the trees. As we get older we re- 
member things more by little impressionist pic- 
tures than as actual happenings. The sea, as 
I have said, was blue — real blue — and there 
was a false blue — some kind of a flower I 
suppose — just beside it and a touch of pearl 
colour above it edged with golden pink, and 
the grey door opening slowly, and rich umber 
within and a face — it seemed ash-colour — 
watching out of it. The children were there 
also in the picture, although I wasn't looking at 
them and could not see them. They were of 
some warm colour that filled up the edges. I 
often see it now — although I am living in 
Chelsea and have no other outlook than the 
chimney-pots over the way. Even Jake — who 
was five feet behind me and clamantly Invisible 
— enters that picture as a sort of brown 
smudge. 

The face was that of the mother, who was 

III 



A Vagabond in New York 

named Mrs. Hopkins and whose husband was 
a farmer. Our introduction was " He's got 
the button " and I am inclined to think that the 
same thing had happened before, because Mrs. 
Hopkins took everything for granted, and told 
me that I could sleep in the barn, before I had 
broached any subject at all. We had prayers 
that night — the family and Jake and a girl and 
two hired men — and I slept like a lamb and 
woke at four in the morning, which as it turned 
out was exactly the time I was supposed to 
wake and gave Mr. Hopkins a very good opin- 
ion of me. I expect that Sarah — who was 
the more mystical of the two — rang up one 
of her particular friends among the angels and 
told him about me and that I was not naturally 
an early riser. 

I am not going to tell you any more about 
Billy and Sarah because I should hate to be 
thought a sentimentalist. Like Jacob I served 
three weeks for Sarah and another three weeks 
for Billy, hewing wood and drawing water, and 
one morning I realised that I was in danger of 
catching the prevalent American disease — 

112 



'Who's Got the Button? 



t* 



sentimentality — and I cliose a moment when I 
knew that Billy and Sarah were busy with the 
tortoise, and I drew my money and left. I 
don't know whether the tortoise was wild or 
domesticated, whether he just grew or whether 
he had escaped from somewhere, but we 
found him, we three, on the edge of the 
runlet one morning when I was supposed to 
be chopping wood in the barn, and I made 
a little hole In his shell and put a bit of 
string through It and we tethered him there 
and called him Alphonso — at least I did; 
Billy and Sarah called him Funs — and we 
made a little dam across the runlet with clay 
and branches in case he should want a swim, 
which I don't think he ever did, and we made 
up a story about his being a Spanish Prince, 
who was looking for the Princess Bright-Eyes, 
and had been turned Into a tortoise by a 
Wicked Witch, and we spent a great deal of 
our time there safeguarding him against 
further enchantment. 

I left by the path that went through the 
wood and past the spring-head and as I 

113 



A Vagabond in New York 

walked along I saw two little figures in blue 
overalls and two little flaxen heads very close 
together bending down over the runlet — and 
since I got back to England quite a number of 
asses have condoled with me over the hard 
times I had in America. 



114 



CHAPTER XI 

A Pair of Boots 




'HEN I have made my fortune and 
buy America I am going to re- 
serve Long Island for my private 
residence and divide the rest among my friends. 
I do not say it is the most beautiful or desirable 
place in the Continent, because there are some 
parts that I don't know; but it happens to 
please me best and as I shall be paying the 
piper I see no reason why I should not call the 
tune. My chief residence will be somewhere 
very near Amicus and for the same reason; I 
don't say it is the most beautiful part of the 
Island — as a matter of fact, it is not — but I 
have very pleasant memories of it indeed. It 
is not called Amicus, but something rather lilce 
it. 

I arrived in Amicus on foot, but as I had 

115 



A Vagabond in New York 

nearly forty dollars in my pocket I put up at 
an hotel. It was not one of the big summer 
palaces down on the Ocean-shore, but a very 
pleasant, old-fashioned place near the railroad 
depot, with a dear old landlady who mothered 
you, and who took no end of trouble to find the 
store where they sold exactly the brand of 
dentifrice you liked best, and who had a hus- 
band who used to come into your bedroom in 
the morning before you were up and sit on the 
edge of the bed and discuss the latest murder 
with you. His way of discussion was rather 
unusual. He would begin, as if he were a 
newspaper headline. " Love drama in Ho- 
boken. Octogenarian millionaire asphyxiated. 
William J. Jones — wife's sister's son sus- 
pected." When he had said that he would 
put something into his mouth and ruminate. I 
never found out what It was — chewing gum, I 
think — but at least he never spat, although 
sometimes he would wander away towards the 
window and take whatever it was out of his 
mouth and look at it very carefully as though 
it were a clue, and then put it back again and sit 

ii6 



'A Pair of Boots 



down on the edge of the bed and resume the 
discussion. I don't mean that he said any- 
thing. As a matter of fact he never spoke; 
only stared very hard at a text hung over in 
one corner of the room, with his head up so 
that you could see the veins and muscles of his 
throat working under his chin-beard In time to 
the great thoughts that were pouring off him. 
After about ten minutes he would get up and 
go away; and I know that he thought well of 
me, because he afterwards got me a job and he 
told the other man that I was the brightest 
talker he had ever known — although, beyond 
"Good-morning" and "Good-night," I really 
do not think I ever said twenty words to him. 

It was not until some weeks later that I un- 
derstood why we always discussed murders. 
It came about because I bought a pair of shoes 
or, as we should call them, boots. I was wear- 
ing, and had been for weeks past, a pair 
of patent-leather Oxfords or, as we should 
say, shoes. They were intolerably outworn, 
but they were very comfortable and somehow 
I had got it so firmly fixed into my head that I 

117 



A Vagabond in New York 

could not afford to buy any others, that I just 
went on wearing them, even when I had money 
in my poclcet. They cracked very badly — I 
do not blame their maker because they were 
never intended for heavy wear. They had 
thirty-eight large cracks — besides the gaping 
abyss behind the left toe-cap, which stood in a 
class by Itself — and a whole network of little 
ones — at the time I parted with them. I 
dropped them Into the clear water of the 
lagoon and three weeks later, when I passed 
over the same spot In a motor-launch, some 
kind of a deep-sea beast — a hermit crab, I sup- 
pose — had made his home In one of them and 
was complaining bitterly to his friends about 
the draughts. 

I should never have bought the new pair if 
It had not been for the small boy In charge of 
the store. It was on the main street, about 
three blocks from the hotel, and It was a little 
store of the kind that calls Itself a Mammoth 
Emporium. I happened to look Into the win- 
dow In passing, and something incredibly red 
caught my eye. I could not be sure what it 

ii8 



A Pair of Boots 



was, and so I went into the store, and it was a 
small boy's head bent down over a paper- 
covered book. He looked up as I came in, 
and on the spur of the moment I bought the 
boots. They were the best boots I ever 
bought. I have them now and they are still in 
fine fettle. They profess to be made of elk- 
skin and I have no doubt they are — and they 
cost me two dollars and seventy-five cents. 

The weather was glorious and the country 
was charming and I didn't feel like doing any 
work and I just loafed around. About two 
days after I bought the new shoes I began to 
realise that I was the object of universal, 
though quite respectful, interest. I found It 
impossible to be alone, wherever I went. If I 
was in a place that no one else had visited since 
the days of Captain Kidd, I might be sure that, 
after I had been there ten minutes, I should 
run across a whole band of aborigines — most 
of them young — trying their very hardest to 
look as if they had foregathered by accident 
and without the remotest idea of finding me 
there. It became embarrassing at last and I 

119 



A Vagabond in New York 

began to think of going back to New York. 
Then, one evening, an elderly gentleman called 
at the hotel and sent in his name to me, and 
said that he had been robbed of six couple, or 
brace, or pair, whichever is the technical term, 
of his prize strain of Buff Orpingtons, and was 
I ready to take up the case? 

I discovered then that I was a famous detect- 
ive, or " sleuth," disguised, for professional 
reasons, as an English vagabond. There had 
been a burglary at a country-place near Amicus 
and I had been sent for from New York to 
trail down the burglars; and that was why I was 
lounging around Amicus, seeming to do noth- 
ing, but all the while stretching my stupendous 
brain and my super-eagle eye to their utter- 
most. My red-headed young friend In the 
shoe-store was the first to discover me. He 
was a fervent student of the works of that 
greatest of all great " sleuths," Mr. Nick 
Carter, whose multitudinous exploits, re- 
counted In I know not how many hundreds or 
thousands of little paper-covered books at 
fifteen cents each, have made him one of the 

120 



A Pair of Boots 



most deservedly popular figures of the West- 
ern Continent. I have read hundreds of his 
adventures myself. At one time I had a per- 
fect passion for them and used to buy them by 
the half-dozen, at a reduced price after he had 
read them himself, from a news storekeeper on 
Sixth Avenue. 

The red-headed boy, overwhelmed by the 
spectacle of a total stranger to Amicus buying 
a pair of shoes at two dollars and seventy-five 
cents, very naturally set his wits to work along 
the lines suggested by his favourite hero and, 
as naturally, decided, from the vacuity of my 
countenance, that I must be a disguised de- 
tective. I am inclined to think and to be 
flattered by the thought that he took me for 
Mr. Carter himself, from the respect, almost 
amounting to veneration, with which I was 
treated by the youth of Amicus. I am in- 
clined to fear also, that he lost, or imperilled, 
his situation in the shoe-store world, for, wher- 
ever and under whatever circumstances I might 
become aware of my respectful circle of ad- 
mirers, there you might be sure, blazing in the 

121 



A Vagabond in New York 

van, like the white plume of King Henry, was 
the scarlet poll I came to know so well. I 
think he hoped that I might some day give him 
a position in the ranks of my assistants; I have 
not the least doubt In the world that he it was 
who spread my fame in Amicus. 

I was sorely tempted to accept the task of 
trailing the lost Buff Orpingtons to their lair, 
but respect for the character of the distin- 
guished gentleman I was representing, who I 
was sure would never have accepted a commis- 
sion so trivial, led me to refuse. Instead, 
I came next morning to an understanding with 
my host, wherein I assured him that I was no 
sleuth but a simple vagabond on the look-out 
for a job, and that I should greatly value his 
assistance In finding one. 

I believe, although he spoke no word, that 
he was bitterly disappointed. I know that he 
was perturbed, because he three times went 
towards the window and studied his clue with- 
out once pausing to sit down on the bed-edge. 
Still without speaking, he left the room and I 
saw no more of him that day. Without any 

122 



A Pair of Boots 



real reason I felt as remorseful as though I had 
intentionally deceived him, and sooner than face 
his reproachful silence I decided to leave 
Amicus that evening. In the end I put it off 
until the next morning and I was glad of it. 
In the first place I received an anonymous let- 
ter, which I still preserve for guidance when I 
bring out my long-projected Spelling Primer. 
It was addressed to " Nick Carter or Chick or 
Patsy Sleuth." It was written in red ink and 
sealed, so to put it, with the representation of 
a blood-red hand holding a scarlet dagger, 
from which dripped very realistic drops of 
gore. It ran as follows: "You are none 
bewair the red hand is upon your trale iff you 
would escap yore liffe mete me disgusd cor. 
First and Vale Av at midnite i will gide too a 
place of safety a frind who meanes you well." 
It was written in an appropriately unformed 
hand, girlish I am inclined to think, rather than 
boyish and I was delighted to receive It, If only 
that It proved that Young England and Young 
America are united by bonds stronger than 
could be forged by many arbitration treaties. 

123 



A Vagabond in New York 

I have been sorry ever since that it did not at 
the time enter my head to keep the appoint- 
ment. I can only hope that any disappoint- 
ment I unwittingly caused was more than out- 
weighed by the undoubted fact that I left my 
hotel next morning; sufficient proof, I hope, to 
the friend who meant me well that his (or her) 
warning had been treated with proper respect. 
I was compelled to leave, quite against my 
will and almost under physical compulsion. 
Mine host turned up at my bedside at his usual 
hour, in a state of high excitement, which he 
showed by adding to his expected headline 
(on that occasion, " Clam Beach. Gustave 
Olaffson. Lost his help.") something about a 
boat. Thereafter he rushed to the window, 
consulted his clue, returned at racing pace and 
uttered the further command, " Come right 
now." He then departed without further 
words, but he left me so disturbed by his por- 
tentous loquacity that I rose at once, to find 
him awaiting me at the stair-foot, as though he 
feared I might otherwise escape him. He al- 
lowed me but little time for my breakfast; and 

124 



A Pair of Boots 



then, hooking his arm in mine, led me away 
with him as might Mr. Carter a defaulting 
cashier. 

Thus personally conducted I arrived some 
half-hour later, before a little wooden shanty 
on Clam Beach. Clam Beach itself was a kind 
of holiday annexe to Amicus — a tiny settle- 
ment on the long, sandy barrier reef that 
guards the southern shores of Long Island. 
There were perhaps twenty wooden bungalows 
and a ramshackle hotel, and Mr, Olaffson's 
bathing establishment; and they were all con- 
nected, like captured flies on a cobweb, by 
single planks across the sand-dunes. You got 
to it from Amicus by a crazy old motor-launch 
across the shallowest, clearest of lagoons. 

Mr. Olaffson's establishment was set on a 
sand-dune midway between the Ocean and the 
lagoon. It is a curious fact, by the way, that 
what is referred to as the sea in England is 
always known in America as the Ocean. It is 
just the same old Atlantic at Long Island as 
it is at the Land's End, but when an American 
talks about It you can see it swelling itself out 

125 



'A Vagabond in New York 

with pride and bridling with pleasure. It is 
the same with most natural things somehow. 
If you took an English hill over to America, 
and set it down all small and humble-minded in 
a field, by the time it woke up next morning it 
would be a Mountain, with all the appropriate 
airs and graces, boasting of its cousins the 
Rockies and speaking pityingly of the Hima- 
layas because, being Asiatics, they can never be- 
come naturalised American citizens. I have 
been told, though I do not vouch for it, that 
when the moon — the same old moon that we 
have in England — looks down on America 
she calls herself a Planet and not a satellite at 
all. It has something to do with the atmo- 
sphere, I suppose. 

Mr. Olaffson was a very, very old man and 
he really wanted a help or, as we should say, 
an assistant. He was much too old to do any- 
thing but sit outside his castle in the sunlight, 
smoking and cursing under his breath. I say 
cursing, because it sounded like it, though he 
was really a very amiable person, and we got on 
famously. Out of the kindness of his heart 

126 



A Pair of Boots 



my friend Mr. Godly assured him that I spoke 
Swedish perfectly. It was a safe enough asser- 
tion because, although Mr. Olaffson was a 
Swede all right, he had been in America so 
many centuries that he had quite forgotten 
Swedish, He had never succeeded in learning 
more than three words of American either, and 
he could not master the meaning even of them. 
So we used to communicate by signs. 

The Castle, as I called It — a name which I 
am told it has ever since retained — was a 
wooden building that was a cross between a 
barn and a mediaeval gate-house. There was 
a big room on top, where bathing suits and 
towels and things were stored, and a little one 
below on each side where Mr. Olaffson and I 
slept, and another big one In the middle that 
was more a corridor than a room, with a huge 
door at either end. Through it you reached 
the bathing-boxes. They stood round a yard 
or compound and they were arranged In the 
shape of a big M, one wing for women and the 
other for men. The boxes themselves were 
about the size and shape of roomy coffins, with 

127 



A Vagabond in New York 

a little seat inside, and besides being bathing- 
boxes they acted as incubators for sand-flies. 
I believe myself that all the sand-flies of Long 
Island looked upon our compound as their ter- 
restrial Paradise. They used to settle there 
in millions and bring up their families and wait 
for visitors. It was very shrewd of them, be- 
cause, by the time a bather was undressed, the 
superficial area of their food-supply was in- 
creased I don't know how many fold, com- 
pared with what it was either before he got 
out of his ordinary clothes or after he was in 
his bathing-suit. Evidently, too, they liked the 
flavour of women better than men, perhaps 
because they smoke less, for there were always 
three times as many in the women's wing and 
they looked healthier and bit more blithely. 

Although Clam Beach was a delightful place 
in its way and the bathing glorious, it was not 
the kind of work I really cared about, and I 
should never have taken it on but that I hated 
the thought of hurting Mr. Godly's feelings. 
There has been always something repulsive to 
me in the feel of a dank, cold, limp bathing- 

128 



A Pair of Boots 



suit after it has been used and Is all covered 
with sand. When I had to deal with dozens 
and dozens of them, they grew more and more 
repulsive, and I got to feel like a rheumatic 
ghoul condemned to work in a damp cemetery. 
Mr. Olaffson's company was not inspiring 
either. The visitors were always nice enough 
to me and their Ideas about tips compared more 
than favourably with those prevalent in Eng- 
lish sea-side resorts, and if I had stopped on I 
might have had a castle of my own by this time. 
But the heat of the summer was waning and I 
felt the call of the city again, and one morning 
I ran away and took the first train back to 
New York. I felt I couldn't face Mr. Godly, 
so I sent him a message to say I had been 
called away on urgent business and that some- 
day I was coming back again. I am going, too, 
whenever I get the chance, because I have 
nothing but pleasant memories of Amicus and 
there are very few places of which I can say 
that. 



129 



CHAPTER XII 

'Seeing New York' 



THE millionaire baby, before and after 
birth, is an important asset to the 
social life of New York. I do not 
mean only to people in the same station of life 
to which he has been called, but to quite a lot 
of low vulgar common folk, myself among 
them. Three — or It may have been four — 
millionaire babies — two of them unborn — 
provided me with two solid weeks of lucrative 
work on my return from Amicus, and It was 
only through my ungrateful neglect of them 
that I lost It. 

As I walked out of the Pennsylvania Ter- 
minus I suddenly realised that I was the victim 
of a bad attack of ambition. For one thing, I 
had over twenty dollars in my pocket; for an- 
other, I had quite a presentable suit of clothes 

130 



'Seeing New York' 



— so long as I stood in the shadow and hid my 
knees and my shoulder-blades behind some- 
thing. I bought the suit second-hand when I 
was a Hindu magician, and the vendor assured 
me that he could guarantee it, as he had worn 
it for five years and it had never flinched. 

I took a hall-room on West Forty-fourth 
Street, and by some marvellous good luck the 
coloured lady who answered the door, when she 
felt like it, was rather struck by me — and I 
escaped having to pay a deposit beforehand. 
I was rather struck by the coloured lady, too — 
especially when she supposed I was English, 
made a casual remark about " damn Yankees," 
and told me she was English herself. She 
said that children of the Empire on which the 
sun never sets should stand shoulder to shoul- 
der. She asked me if I came from London, 
and, when I said I did, she rather thought we 
might be cousins, because she was born in 
Brixton herself. As a matter of fact, I had 
washed quite hard that morning, but I only 
said It was very likely indeed. 

It was through Cousin Euphemia that I be- 

131 



A Vagabond in New York 

came a guide-lecturer. It was quite by acci- 
dent, too; if I had had enough money left at 
the end of the third week to pay my bill, I 
should very likely be looking for work now. I 
tried hard to get a clerkship or something that 
would live up to my clothes, but I don't sup- 
pose I went the right way about it. I an- 
swered advertisements, but somehow, as soon 
as I had found the place and screwed up my 
courage to go In and ask about the job, I used 
to get turned out. I don't mean physically. 
I used to be taken into a room where there was 
a wooden desk and a man sitting behind it with 
a face that had been carved out of the same 
piece of wood. Before I could say anything 
he would look at me and say, " Nop," and go 
on with what he was doing. It never varied. 
In the end I got desperate, and I went to one 
of the big office-buildings on Broadway and I 
tried every office in it. There was always the 
same man and the same desk, and he always 
looked at me and said, " Nop " — all the way 
down from the eighteenth floor to the ground. 
After that I lost interest and went down to the 

132 



'Seeing New York' 



Battery and watched the liners on their way to 
England. 

At the end of the third week I only had two 
dollars towards the five I owed. I told Cousin 
Euphemia about it, and she suggested that 
I should be a guide-lecturer. She told me of a 
firm on Broadway, and I got a recommenda- 
tion from my friend Dempsey, the policeman, 
in which he very kindly said I was his brother, 
and so I got the job. I used to drive about on 
a motor char-a-banc, a long, sloping arrange- 
ment like those you see in London in the sum- 
mer. I had a megaphone and explained the 
sights in a loud voice. New York isn't half a 
bad place, but it is deficient in sights, and if it 
wasn't for the millionaire babies I am afraid 
I should have sometimes had to invent things. 
Fortunately, though, the country tripper who 
comes to New York doesn't care about sights 
as we understand them in England — unless 
they are very expensive. My most popular 
tour used to start by passing the Waldorf 
Hotel. We used to stop there while I told 
them what was the annual income of the guests 

133 



"A Vagabond in New York 

who put up there, and how much the ladies in 
the Peacock Parade spent on diamonds for 
their shoe-heels, and that sort of thing. I am 
no good at figures, and I expect they varied 
sometimes, but my clients were always satis- 
fied. Then we used to take them to Saint 
Patrick's Cathedral. They didn't trouble to 
go inside, of course, but we stopped for a min- 
ute or two while I told them what the site cost, 
and the average value of the jewels in the copes 
and things worn by the clergy. Then we went 
on up Fifth Avenue to where the babies lived. 
Luckily for me there was quite a glut of them 
at that time. When we passed a likely look- 
ing house — you can always tell, because mil- 
lionaire architecture reminds you of a new 
restaurant in Leicester Square — we used to 
pull up while I explained, through the mega- 
phone, that we were opposite the princely 
home of Mr. Potiphar J. Scrawlenfeldt, 
whose income was so many millions a week, 
and who had spent so many billions on the 
house and so many on the furniture, and had 
married the daughter of so many more, and 

134 




I had a megaphone and explained the sights in a loud voice. 



''Seeing New York' 



was expecting a son in about three weeks, who 
would be heir to so many trillions. I was 
rather successful. 

We weren't the only sightseers by any 
means. Sometimes there would be half-a-dozen 
cars at once, stopping opposite one man- 
sion, each with a megaphone going, which 
made things cheerful for the expectant mother. 
If I had been her I think I should have felt 
embarrassed, but in New York she gets to look 
for it, and sometimes she would appear at a 
window by accident amid the cheers of the rub- 
berers, and the booming of the megaphones, and 
the clicking of the living-picture cameras. As 
I said, I was rather successful and I am not at 
all sure that I had not really found my occu- 
pation in life if only my success hadn't resulted 
in a bad attack of swelled head. There is one 
bit of Manhattan where there really are some 
sights, as we of the old world understand them. 
Between Wall Street — where the old wall 
stood in the Dutch days — and the nose of the 
island there are a lot of quaint streets and one 
or two old houses — seventeenth-century sort 

135 



A Vagabond in New York 

of style — with a certain amount of old-world 
feeling about them that, in my insular preju- 
dice, I thought would make up a good lec- 
ture. I got my proprietor to try sending a 
car round there for a change, and rashly guar- 
anteed that I could make a success of It. I 
couldn't. On my fourth trip I only had two 
rubberers, and they were both furious because 
I didn't show them where the Bilkheimer baby 
was expected. They complained when we got 
back. The boss told me I was too intellectual 
— only he didn't put It quite so nicely — and I 
had to leave. 



136 



CHAPTER XIII 

A Turn at Starving 



F we had always to eat the same food I 
suppose we should never eat anything. I 
know at least that quite the worst aspect 
of starvation is its monotony; there is nothing 
else anywhere that can equal it in lack of in- 
cident. After I lost my job as a guide-lec- 
turer I had a run of really bad luck, and I 
learnt the whole philosophy of starvation at 
first hand. I was not a bit well, to start with. 
If I had been moving in a more exalted sphere 
I suppose I should have said I had a nervous 
breakdown. As it was, I could only call it an 
absolute lack of energy, or moral force, or 
something of that sort, that gave me an infinite 
distaste for doing anything at all. Unkind 
people might call it sheer laziness; but it was 
not that. On the contrary, I used to have 

137 



A Vagabond in New York 

terrific fits of energy; but they always tailed 
away just at the moment when they began to 
produce results. I used to spend hours work- 
ing out great schemes towards this, that or the 
other mighty end, and then dropping them. 
Very naturally they none of them came to any- 
thing and I came to real starvation. 

There is only one good thing about starving; 
the longer it lasts the less it hurts. The first 
day is the worst — because your mind feels it 
most. If ever I wanted to start a Terror, I 
should pick only men who had starved abso- 
lutely for twenty-four hours. After that you 
begin to lose interest. 

I had to leave my hall-room — which corre- 
sponds to an attic in London, though it is really 
a little room fitted in over the entrance hall — 
after the first week. I left It with thirty-five 
cents in my pocket and the well-wishes of my 
coloured cousin Euphemia. I husbanded my 
fortune, but it did not last long; New York is 
an expensive city. I couldn't get a job; I 
knew nobody who could help me towards one; 
even my friend Dempsey was absent from his 

138 



A Turn at Starving 



usual beat. I was absurdly ignorant about 
charities. They exist, of course, by dozens, 
but I didn't know of them. If any one who 
reads this wants to start a charity, let him estab- 
lish one for strangers, without regard to their 
deserts, and let him advertise its whereabouts 
by huge posters, so that any poor devil can find 
It. He mustn't ask any questions either. I 
have no doubt a native New Yorker — as, In 
London, a native Londoner — would know ex- 
actly where to find a free meal and have a dozen 
excellent reasons for getting it. I didn't, and 
there are many thousands like me. While I 
had sufficient energy left to inquire, I had suffi- 
cient to look for a job, and when that was gone 
I was past Inquiring. I did have some vague 
idea of appealing to the British Consul. I 
even went to look for him, but when I found 
the place — down by the Battery, at the cor- 
ner of Whitehall Street, I think It Is — It was 
so shabby and had so dirty an entrance that I 
didn't go in. This sounds absurd enough, but 
it is true. That was the third day of my fast, 
and I suppose I was getting fanciful. 

139 



A Vagabond in New York 

The first day, as I say, my mind suffered 
most. I stormed and raved inwardly at every 
one who looked as If he had enough money on 
him for the next meal. The second day my 
body suffered. I had the most horrible Indi- 
gestion sort of cramps — exactly as If I had 
eaten too much. I remember thinking how 
unfair It was. The third day both mind and 
body suffered, only less acutely. I was fool 
enough to eat something on the fourth. A 
bench neighbour — a working man who had 
got drunk over night and had a black eye, and 
was afraid to go home and face his wife — 
gave me a quarter, and I spent twenty cents of 
It on food, most of It on corned (or, as we 
should say, salt) beef hash. It made me quite 
horribly 111 — until I was mercifully sick, after 
which I felt better. I spent the remaining five 
cents upon cigarettes — they were called 
" Hassans," — ten of them. I don't know who 
made them, but here Is an unsolicited testi- 
monial: I never enjoyed anything so much in 
my life. Like a fool, I smoked them all right 
off on end, with no thought for the morrow, 

140 



A Turn at Starving 



and I felt uncommonly ill afterwards for the 
second time. I was beyond caring about things 
much. 

Past the Battery Park, at the very nose of 
the island of Manhattan, are the big termini 
from which the ferry boats start for Brooklyn 
and Staten Island and other suburbs. There is 
an iron gallery beside one of them, approached 
by a long flight of steps, where you can stand 
and watch all the shipping coming up and down 
the harbour. I found it out by accident, the 
day I was looking for the Consulate — and I 
got into the way of going there and watching 
out for ships that flew the Union Jack. There 
were three of them to one of any other flag, 
and somehow it did me a lot of good. I felt 
quite a ridiculous amount of pride in the 
thought that there was still something in the 
world in which I had some little share. I ex- 
pect I should have pawned my share just then 
if it had had any cash value, but the feeling was 
there all the same. 

On the sixth day I was feeling thoroughly 
content — in a sort of dreamy haze in which 

141 



A Vagabond in New York 

nothing mattered in all this world or the next. 
I slept on a bench in the Battery Park. It 
rained a little and I got wet, but was too lazy 
to move in under the shelter of the Elevated, 
and I saw the Olympic, I think it was, going 
out, and followed her with my eyes all the way 
until she got lost in the mist somewhere by 
Staten Island, and gloried to myself that she 
was the biggest boat in the world and English. 
Then I took it into my head to walk round the 
path between the little park and the water's 
edge, where the excursion steamers start. It 
was about ten o'clock in the morning. 

The excursion boats are very popular In the 
warm weather, and there is a good deal of 
competition among them, and they all have 
runners out to catch the unwary tripper who 
hasn't quite made up his mind. I was mooning 
along, thinking about nothing at all, when there 
came a little spirtle of wind from the water 
and something slapped me across the eyes. I 
grabbed at it, and it was a dollar bill. I saw 
then that it must have come from one of the 
ticket touts, who stand about with tickets in 

142 



A Turn at Starving 



one hand, ready to sell, and bunches of dollars 
in the other, to show what good business they 
are doing and how popular their boats are. 

I suppose if I had thought about it I should 
have stuck to that greenback, but the habit of 
instinctive honesty is difficult to throw off. 
Anyway, I took it to its proper owner. He 
was a large red Jew, but a white man all the 
same. I must have looked like a second-class 
pirate; I hadn't shaved or washed, or had my 
clothes off, for a week, and I think I was a bit 
unsteady in my walk by that time. But either 
he was amazed at my honesty or he saw I 
looked rather faded; anyhow, he took me in 
and did for me. He made me sit down on a 
bench and wait until he was off duty, and then 
he stood me a meal — a sensible meal, only 
hot soup to begin with — and a wash and a 
shave. And, by the way, whoever starts my 
ideal stranger's charity should provide it with 
free baths and washing accommodation and 
free shaving. How any man who looks as I 
did, dirty and ragged, and with a week-old 
beard on his face, and the smell — for even 

143 



A Vagabond in New York 

the cleanest of us are unpleasant after we have 
worn our clothes for a week consecutively — 
how he can be expected to find work, or to have 
the heart to look for It, Is past my compre- 
hension. There ought to be free collars and 
cuffs provided, too, even if they are only made 
of paper; nothing Improves a man's chances so 
much as wearing a clean collar. The coat 
doesn't matter nearly so much. 

To make a long story short, my Jewish 
friend got me a berth on the Lake Island boats 
— ^ as I will call them — to go round among 
the passengers and take orders for beer. 
Afterwards, when a vacancy fell In, I might 
look forward to acting as bar-man In a curious 
little horseshoe bar tucked away between the 
paddle-wheels. I had a white coat and a clean 
face, and I bought myself a dandy yachting 
cap, and altogether If I had met myself of a 
week before I shouldn't have cared to be seen 
speaking to me. That was the worst week I 
spent in New York, and I don't want another 
like It anywhere. 



144 



CHAPTER XIV 

The CUld Terrible 



I SOMETIMES wonder whether London 
or New York has most to complain of, 
In the way of reputation. If you believe 
the accounts of the untravelled American, who 
has not been there, London Is a chaotic dust- 
heap, only rendered tolerable by the fact 
that constant fogs prevent your seeing It. 
New York again is revealed to the unseeing 
eyes of the English world as a wilderness of 
Impossibly tall skyscrapers, divided up Into ex- 
actly regular blocks, and peopled by hurrying 
hordes who dash madly about rectilinearly, 
overturning each other without shame In the 
race for wealth. 

As a matter of fact, except for a few out- 
lying examples, the skyscrapers of New York 
are all bunched up together In a space very 

145 



A Vagabond in New York 

much smaller than the One Square Male, and the 
rest of the city is a cross between Bloomsbury 
and Berlin. So much for the works of Man; 
Nature has given it a setting so gracious that 
not all mankind working for eternity will ever 
be able to make it anything less than beautiful. 
And its greatest beauties are concentrated 
about its waterways. The best way to see 
New York is by steamer and the only draw- 
back is that in that case you can scarcely avoid 
the huge advertisement sign, set out in enor- 
mous letters in front of Brooklyn, which tells 
you that a certain Hungarian mineral water is 
invaluable for stomachic complaints. I have 
bowdlerised it considerably, but such is its 
general message. It is at least as blatant to 
the eye of incoming steamship passengers as is 
the statue of Liberty. 1 do not say that it is 
out of place. Liberty and stomachic com- 
plaints are certainly the keynotes of American 
life; and whoever arranged that the Liberty 
Statue should stand with her back to America, 
looking towards Europe with a hopeful expres- 

146 



The Child Terrible 



sion, as though watching out for a really re- 
liable liver-pill, knew his country. 

As has been said of Manchester, one of the 
best features of New York is the ease with 
which you can get away from It. It has a 
service of excursion steamers to everywhere 
that could not be bettered anywhere in the 
world, despite a tendency to explode at odd 
moments. You can go by steamer to I know 
not how many ports and towns and pleasure 
resorts at whatever distance you prefer; you 
can go for very little indeed, and you may be 
sure that wherever you go you will thoroughly 
enjoy the voyage. 

The steamer on which I sold beer for a time 
was called, let us say, the Jatte McCracken, 
and plied between the Battery and Lake 
Island, which Is a pleasant summer resort In 
the State of New York, about thirty miles by 
water from the City, and looking over the 
Sound which divides Long Island from the con- 
tinent. It Is a very popular voyage and very 
rightly, for even I, who had to make the trip 

147 



A Vagabond in New York 

twice a day in the way of duty, enjoyed it 
thoroughly, embarrassed though I was by a 
tray of ice-cream cornucopias, a collection of 
beer-glasses, or a load of pop-corn, according to 
circumstances. 

I know no better way of getting acquainted 
with a people than by studying them at their 
pleasures, and I would defy any one to study 
the New York populace, as exemphfied by 
travellers on the Lake Island Line, without lik- 
ing them. They were not so well disciplined, 
in the way of queues and crowding, as would 
be, say, a Bank Holiday mob In London; they 
were at least as kindly and very much more so- 
ciable. Thanks, I suppose, to the large pro- 
portion of Jews among them, the Lake Island 
trippers were more patrlarchally gregarious 
than are the Londoners. I do not mean to say 
that there was not a fair percentage of de- 
tached couples; but for the most part they 
tripped in family batches, grandfather and 
grandmother, father and mother, four assorted 
aunts and uncles, and, say, three hobbledehoys 
and as many flappers — or, as New York has 

148 



The Child Terrible 



it, " broilers " — each provided with an ap- 
propriate sweetheart, and courting under the 
maternal eye with a determined earnestness only 
to be equalled by the couples on the benches in 
Hyde Park of a Sunday evening. Then, of 
course, there were the children — shoals of 
them. Professionally speaking, the children 
were the most welcome of all our patrons, in 
that they had an insatiable appetite for ice- 
cream, which I vended, arranged in little 
cornucopias of wafer at five cents each. Their 
elders, on the other hand, not infrequently 
brought their own viands, and were as such less 
desirable, seeing that I was partly paid by a 
percentage on the receipts. 

We were not, of course, confined to tripper 
trafiic. We had a large number of regular 
passengers, living in and around New Rochelle 
and similar suburban centres, who used our boat 
as the pleasantest link with New York. Some 
of them I got to know very well, and especially 
Helga, who was at once the wickedest and the 
most fascinating little minx I ever knew. 

Actually I know very little about her, as she 

149 



A Vagabond in New York 

would vary her information about herself ac- 
cording to her mood of the moment. I call 
her Helga because such was the first name she 
mentioned to me, but she called herself by 
quite a number of others, according as she 
thought them momentarily desirable. So with 
her age; at different times she told me that she 
was five, seven, eight, nine, ten and even once, 
sixteen, which I did not believe. She was an 
uncommonly pretty monkey with a fresh little 
face, full of deviltry, a mop of golden hair, 
and very long, slim, black legs, which were I 
think her most characteristic feature. She 
made love to me most scandalously, from the 
first time that she saw me with my ice-cream 
tray; and thereafter whenever she was aboard 
paid me, or it, unending breathless court. She 
had an exceedingly comfortable-looking papa 
and a very pretty mamma, whom I used to ob- 
serve gazing at her with languid surprise as 
though wondering how she could be responsible 
for such a bantling. She would refer to her 
father in casual conversation as " the Man " 
and considerably embarrassed me, upon our 

150 




She made love to me from the first time she saw me with 
my ice-cream tray. 



TJie Child Terrible 



second meeting, by leading me, tray and all, 
up to her mother and demanding loudly, " Isn't 
she perfectly sweet?" 

I mention her with some particularity, firstly 
because I fell desperately In love with her, and 
secondly because she was, directly, the cause 
of my very narrowly escaping drowning and, 
indirectly, of my losing my employment. At 
Lake Island, our terminus, the boat used to be 
made fast to an ornamental pier-head in a tiny 
bay. Into and out of which it had to back with 
unusual care. On one occasion while it was 
backing towards the pier I happened to be 
standing beside the Monkey on a little plat- 
form just abaft the paddle-box. In the usual 
way It was protected by an iron railing, but 
that had been removed, In readiness for land- 
ing. The Monkey, whose chief joy was to 
arouse her seniors' fears by pushing herself 
Into dangerous positions, managed in some way 
to drop overboard a large model of a torpedo- 
boat with which her father had that day dow- 
ered her. I daresay It was an excellent model, 
but It was no swimmer and promptly dlsap- 

151 



A Vagabond in New York 

peared in the foam from the starboard paddle. 
About to burst into a scream of anguish, the 
Monkey, presuming as usual, upon my devo- 
tion, changed her mind and ordered me, with 
her most fascinating rnoiie, to jump overboard 
after it. I declined. Thereupon, with the 
calm remark, " Then perhaps you will jump 
after me," she promptly leapt after her toy into 
the water. Drowning is a death after which 
I have no sort of hankering and I was about 
to turn on my heel, in order to acquaint the 
captain with the loss of one of his passengers, 
when my foot somehow slipped and I followed 
her. Once in the water there seemed no par- 
ticular reason why I should not so far assist 
the imp as to guide her away from the paddle- 
blades, which were twirling about in the air 
just over and unpleasantly close to our heads. 
I have an impression that the water was not 
more than three or four feet deep. However 
that may be, we scrambled ashore, without dam- 
age, except to my temper, in about a minute; 
whereafter ensued a scene of which I cannot 
think even now, without a blush of reminiscent 

152 



The Child Terrible 



shame. There happened to be a clergyman on 
board and a reporter — it would be amazing if 
there had not been, in a country where both are 
so common — and I will not dwell upon the 
horrid orgy that ensued. I did not see most 
of it, because I was engaged in borrowing dry 
clothes from the rest of the crew, but by the 
time I got on deck again the clergyman had 
arrived at Fourthly; and the reporter, having 
interviewed all the passengers, the crew and 
the pier officials, was discussing with the cap- 
tain the possibility of having the affair re-en- 
acted before the cinematograph machine he 
proposed to rush down from New York by 
automobile. 

You will understand that there was only one 
thing to be done. My borrowed plumes for- 
tunately proved sufficient disguise; a trolley-car 
was about to start on the other side of the 
ferry; in half-an-hour I was in New Rochelle 
and in another ninety minutes or so I was back 
in New York, a workless wanderer once more. 
I cannot say how sorry I was. I was quite ab- 
surdly fond of the Monkey, and apart from her, 

153 



A Vagabond in New York 

I was very happy on the Jane McCracken. I 
have knocked about the world a good deal in 
my time, but I do not know when I have seen 
anything more beautiful than some of the trips 
we used to make homewards after sunset, down 
the Sound. It is an enchanted shore at the 
worst of times — something hke the trip up to 
Southampton from the Needles, only five times 
as long and, especially after sundown, a dozen 
times as beautiful. There is always a mys- 
terious shore to right and left, fading and 
advancing as you turn and twist along the chan- 
nel. Just as you start you will have the melt- 
ing gold and russet and saffron of the sunset, 
deepening into violet, on your right hand; and 
suddenly behind you the whole of Lake Island 
bursts into a luminous outline of little points of 
fire, as they turn on the illuminations. They 
are only electric lights and they outline quite 
ugly things, a Ferris Wheel and a mountain 
railway and so on, but as you leave them be- 
hind they twist themselves into pagodas and 
enchanted palaces and vague dancing shapes 
that are too elusive to build thoughts upon, or 

154 



The Child Terrible 



more than visions. The Sound is very still, 
only a soft fresh breeze fans your temples and 
all around you the pale shadows of the islands 
deepen to purple invisibility; and somewhere 
ahead are the blood-red and flowery green pin- 
pricks of passing vessels; and little bustling 
lights spring out on the growing shores and 
behind you the glimmer of the golden palaces 
of fairyland fades and fades. Everything 
seems hushed and stilled into eternal immobil- 
ity; you only are rushing through space on the 
wings of the night; somewhere above you, wav- 
ing solemnly across the starlight, are the great 
propeller beams that make the Jane McCracken 
seem like a sluggish spider drawing Itself 
along an unseen web. The lights of Lake 
Island fade at last into a mere incandescence 
behind you, and other stars rise slowly from 
the unseen distances you go to meet. To 
sit there, on the upper deck, with the woman 
you love and gaze out forward, to where one 
solitary golden star set high in the heavens 
tells you — although it Is In itself nothing more 
romantic than the clock-face of the Metropoli- 

155 



A Vagabond in New York 



tan Life Building in Madison Square a dozen 
miles away from you — that somewhere the 
only real Paradise — they call it Home — is 
waiting . . . 

But this is all very absurd, well enough for 
married, respectable folk, lords and slaves of 
small imps with warm, confiding palms, but not 
for vagabonds, with no more useful mission in 
life than to take orders for beer. " Ice-cream I 
Ice-cream ! ! Now then. Folks — who wants 
ice-cream ? Five cents ! Only Five Cents ! " 



156 



CHAPTER XV 

Called to the Bar 



I ATTAINED the summit of human am- 
bition — as understood by many mil- 
lions of people in New York, London, 
and elsewhere — on the same day that I be- 
came a life-long teetotaller from birth, like 
Mr. Bryan, Mr. Lloyd George and other nota- 
bilities. I do not mean because of it. It hap- 
pened after I had dismissed myself from my 
job on the Jane McCracken. I had to visit 
her, in secret, in order to give back the clothes 
I had borrowed and to collect what was left 
of my own. They were not unshrinkable, un- 
fortunately, and there was very little of them 
left. 

I am inclined to think that the most remark- 
able thing about humanity is the number of 
really nice people — white men, as you would 

157 



A Vagabond in New York 

say in America — it includes. In my erratic 
wanderings through life the preponderance of 
white folk I have come across is quite over- 
whelming; it is true that, judged by the ordi- 
nary standards of morality, some of them might 
be regarded, by respectable people, as very 
rank outsiders indeed. I am reminded of this 
when I think of Captain — technically known 
as " Cap " — Lane, who was the skipper of the 
Jane McCracken. I have heard it darkly 
hinted, among the crew — a crew, be it remem- 
bered, is at least as devoted to scandal as is a 
convent or a small provincial town — that 
" Cap " Lane was a most immoral man — that, 
exceeding the proverbial privilege accorded to 
sea-faring men, he not only had a wife in every 
port, but two or three. If so, I am sure they 
were all devoted to him, and that however many 
children he may have had, he was an ideal 
father to each and all of them. He was rather 
a small man, with a bluff voice that yet had in 
it the sort of timbre that made you want to 
put your head on his shoulder and sob out your 
troubles to him. I never did, because my re- 

158 



Called to the Bar 



lations with him were purely official, but if I 
had been his wife, or somebody else's, I can 
imagine myself doing it all day long. He was 
just coming off the Jane McCracken when I 
met him. 

Cap Lane used to drink a great deal more 
than was good for him. He drank according 
to a system of his own. For twenty-two hours 
out of the twenty-four he was strictly teetotal. 
I think it was the result of some promise he had 
made to his mother on her death-bed, but any- 
way he had to crowd into two hours all the 
drinking that the ordinary man can spread 
through the day and part of the night. He 
was very methodical about It. Our last trip 
usually brought us back to New York some- 
where after nine in the evening. As soon as 
the ship was moored Cap Lane left her at once, 
betook himself to a saloon on Greenwich 
Street, and set himself solidly to the task of 
pouring into himself as much liquor as was 
humanly possible in the short one hundred and 
twenty minutes available. I do not believe he 
liked it — not, at least, taken at railway speed; 

159 



A Vagabond in New York 

he regarded it as a stern duty and he did. I do 
not think it ever made him drunk. On at least 
one occasion I was privileged to see him home 
— to one of his homes at any rate, in Green- 
wich. He was certainly not drunk then; he 
explained to me, I remember, the method in 
which pilots " con " a ship and he did it as 
clearly as might a mathematical professor. 
Yet, as it was currently reported, he already 
carried within himself that evening enough 
liquor to enable a moderate-sized steamer to 
come to her moorings without any fear of 
grounding whatever. 

I met him, as I say, just as I was slinking 
towards the gangway, in the faint hope that I 
might secure my small property without at- 
tracting undue attention. He captured me, in 
silence, and drew me with him across the park 
and into the saloon of his choice. There, fix- 
ing me with his eye, he held me in irons until 
he had produced from his pocket a letter. It 
was from Helga's father and it was quite flat- 
tering — evidently the Monkey had held fast 
to her self-imposed convention of never telling 

i6o 



Called to the Bar 



the truth where a lie was possible — and it 
enclosed a hundred-dollar bill. 

One of the commonest mistakes made by 
people of the middle and upper-middle classes 
is to suppose that they and their superiors 
monopolise the finer shades of sensibility. 
Cap Lane was not " geboren," as the Germans 
have it. He first saw the light in the cabin 
of a barge on the Erie Canal, and spent most 
of his youth irritating with a bent pin at the end 
of a stick the tails of the mules who drew his 
father and his fortunes. Yet he understood at 
once why I did not feel like taking that hundred- 
dollar bill, and he agreed to divide the reward 
among the members of the crew and their 
auxiliaries and did it faithfully. What is more, 
he carried me off with him, that same evening, 
to the saloon on Eighth Avenue owned by a 
friend named Macgregor. Mr. Macgregor 
had all the assistants he required, but that made 
no difference at all. He had to accept me — 
and knowing Cap Lane I suppose he knew it; 
and within five minutes I was setting up the 
bottles and the Cap was pouring chasers down 

i6i 



A Vagabond in New York 

his throat; and I can honestly say that I was 
not nearly so clumsy as you would have thought 
at the time, but that I really was trying to help 
him go slow. 

What we call a public-house, and usually be- 
lieve that the Americans call a saloon, calls 
itself in New York a cafe — or as an American 
Pitman would spell it, a kaafe. When I be- 
came a bar-tender in a cafe I had to become a 
lifelong teetotaller from birth, because that is 
almost a sine qua non in New York bar-tending. 
At the same time I was raised in the public eye 
to a rank a little higher than a marquisate in 
England and a little lower than a dukedom. 

The bar-tender is the only person in New 
York who is addressed as " sir " — In the Eng- 
lish way of using the word — by what we 
should call the lower classes. The policeman 
is sometimes similarly honoured by unln- 
structed foreigners, but only when they are 
honest. The rest, who are in the majority, 
call him " son " or " youse guy," according to 
the closeness of their intimacy. The bar-tender 
: — and especially the proprietor — is not at all 

162 



Called to the Bar 



the pimply, dirty old Irish reprobate with an 
impossible brogue, a hard-worked sense of hu- 
mour and an unquenchable loquacity, popular- 
ised by Mr. Dooley and other humorists. 
Instead, he is a silent, keen-eyed, close-lipped 
business man, with a neat taste in tailoring and 
a prejudice against alcoholic stimulant. I have 
said I was a teetotaller; so were my three col- 
leagues, and the boy and the terrier and the 
proprietor — some of even longer standing. 
Two were earnest church workers — Scotch 
Presbyterians, as well — but I was not, because 
it was optional. 

You need a character if you wish to prosper 
as a New York bar-tender. In some other 
trades — politics and the delicatessen industry, 
for instance — you are better without one. 
Instead, in applying for a job. If the boss — 
pronounced " baws," by the way — asks if you 
have had experience, you say nothing at all — 
you just wink and smile. The more meaning 
you can get into that wink the more certain you 
are of getting the job. I had a character — 
given me by Cap Lane, and he knew the boss's 

163 



A Vagabond in New York 



prejudices. The boss's name was, as I have 
said, Macgregor, and he was from County 
Down, and had a liking for his fellow-country- 
men. So I was from County Down, too, like 
the rest of the establishment, down to the ter- 
rier. My name was Mackintosh — with the 
accent on the I — but I left home very young 
before I learned to speak Ulster, as my father 
was an earnest Orangeman, much persecuted by 
the local Papistry. I was born in a village, the 
name of which I forget, but which Mr. Mac- 
gregor recognised as soon as Cap Lane told 
him of it, though he had not visited it for some 
years. He was able to tell me all about it, and 
even to describe the cottage I must have been 
born in. After a time he began to remember 
my father and what a decent man he was, and 
how he had a son who used to go about in a 
hat three sizes too large for him. I said it 
was my elder brother, but he insisted it was I, 
because he began to remember the boy's face, 
and it had exactly my eyes and hair and nose, 
and was inclined to stoutness. We nearly 
quarrelled over it, and I found out he was an 

164 



Called to the Bar 



ill man to contradict. He insisted on calling 
me Alexander afterwards, which was the elder 
brother's name, instead of William, which was 
mine, because he was quite sure I z(fas the elder 
brother, who had got into trouble for shooting 
at a parish priest from behind a hedge, and 
was trying to pass myself off as my own junior. 
It was a bit mixed, but it made us very good 
friends again, and he promised to put me up 
for the " martyr " branch of his Lodge, which 
included all those who had suffered for the 
Cause. 

The cafe was on the corner of a block, as 
most of them are. Nearly every block in New 
York has a cafe at each of its four corners, a 
couple of gambling-hells somewhere handy, 
eight shoe-shining stands, where they also sell 
oranges and chocolates, and a church. I don't 
say this is universal; sometimes one of the shoe- 
shining stands is left out and sometimes the 
church, but never the cafes. They are rather 
like churches themselves in atmosphere. Ours 
was, at any rate. I suggested, when I had been 
there some little time, that it would not be a 

165 



A Vagabond in New York 

bad idea to open proceedings with prayer, ac- 
cording to the ritual of the Church of Scotland. 
I meant it humorously, but Mr. Macgregor 
was struck with the idea, and only gave it up 
for fear it would be bad for the business, as we 
had so many Jewish customers. He liked me 
all the better for it, though. 

Curiously enough, one of our customers was 
Mr. Cholmondely, whose delicatessen store 
was only a few blocks off. As you may remem- 
ber, we had parted unfriends on a matter of 
chickens. So the first evening he came in when 
I was serving, feeling rather proud of my white 
coat and white apron — white suits my com- 
plexion, I have been told — I made up my 
mind to Ignore him. He wouldn't be Ignored, 
though; he reached out for my hand as if it 
had been a greenback, and stood there slob- 
bering with his hat off and calling me " Ma 
tear," and waiting with a pathetic little smile 
for me to nod to him. I realised then for the 
first time how high I had risen. 

When I say the cafe was like a church, I 
mean that you never heard loud voices or bad 

1 66 



Called to the Bar 



language in it. Customers all had a deferen- 
tial air, and used to swallow their whisky — 
always " chasers," whisky first and water after- 
wards out of two separate glasses — as if it 
was medicine. The place was all swathed in 
white muslin, with pink rosettes, to keep the 
flies off the looking-glasses, and the bar was a 
big round horseshoe, like a rostrum, swept and 
garnished, and behind it was a sort of trophy of 
bottles like an organ-case. All this decency 
and propriety was because there were no bar- 
maids and no women customers. None visible, 
I mean. I have often heard good Americans 
lament over the number of women you see in 
public-houses in London, and rejoice that such 
a spectacle is unknown in New York. That 
is because they know nothing of the " Family 
Entrance." There aren't "public" and "pri- 
vate " and " saloon " bars In New York, but 
there is a family entrance, which In our case 
meant a little room at the back of the cafe with 
a separate door. It was used chiefly on Sun- 
days when we were supposed to be shut, and 
there would be more women than men In It 

167 



A Vagabond in New York 

half the time. It was used after closing hours, 
too. We nominally closed at one, by which 
time the really seasoned topers hadn't got 
properly to work, but we kept open as long as 
there were any customers. Because I was 
rather large and heavy Macgregor put me on 
duty In the " Family " department right from 
the beginning, and there was not any ecclesias- 
tical atmosphere about that. Chucking out was 
not so easy as it is in London, because every 
cafe has storm doors — glass-porch arrange- 
ments to keep out the cold In winter — and If 
your man struggled It was difficult to get him 
through without breaking the glass. Mac- 
gregor was In favour of stunning him first, but 
if you killed him you were almost certain to 
have trouble with the police and get fined or 
something. 

I stayed at the cafe quite a long time; and I 
only left because I was offered a partnership 
by a customer in vaudeville, which had always 
interested me. 



i68 



CHAPTER XVI 

A Son of the Empire 



THE educational value of the public- 
house is seldom recognised by social 
reformers. In actual fact it has all 
the advantages of that academy to which the 
elder Mr. Weller sent his son Samuel, with 
none of its drawbacks. Personally, I learned 
more in Mr. Macgregor's cafe than I have ever 
learned outside it — and not of matters con- 
nected with the liquor trade only. For one 
thing, I learned to understand English. 

When I first went to New York I got a job 
on a newspaper, I am ashamed to say how 
short a time I held it, and I cannot fairly quar- 
rel with the reason for my dismissal, which 
was that my English was very much too pro- 
vincial for a really high-toned metropolitan 
journal. More urgent matters prevented my 

169 



A Vagabond in New York 

giving any appreciable time to the study of the 
language until I became a bar-tender, and then 
I realised how thoroughly justified had been my 
expulsion from that first newspaper office. But 
I did not despair. I set to work to master the 
subject, and by the time I had learned the four 
chief secrets I felt emboldened to try my 
prentice hand at journalism once more. I do 
not mean that I tried after actual journalistic 
employment — I knew my own limitations too 
well for that, — but I began to send round little 
articles and one or two of them were accepted 
and I can't tell you how proud I was. Proud, 
I mean, to see that I was still capable of learn- 
ing and that within a year or two I might expect 
to be able to speak President's English quite 
passably. It is something, after all, to be able 
to write In two languages and all the more so 
when they have so many queer surface resem- 
blances. The Germans are very capable lin- 
guists; yet you will never find a German who 
can speak Dutch; It Is too much like his own 
language. 

There are several shibboleths by which the 

170 



A Son of the Empire 



true New Yorker may recognise the provincial 
young man from England. Here follow four 
of the most important, by a careful observance 
of which the Englishman may for a long time 
escape conviction, even in the Anglo-Saxon 
metropolis itself. Imprimis, he has a fatal 
habit of using such phrases as " You must," 
" You should," " It Is essential that you — " 
and so forth, when there is only one safe way 
of expressing the same Idea, " You gotta." 
Again, he will say, or write — which Is even 
worse — " A quarter to ten." He should say, 
" A quarter of ten." He will talk of being 
" called after So-and-so." It should be 
" named for So-and-so." Finally, he will say 
" Yes " or " No " — words perfectly unfamiliar 
to the cultured Anglo-Saxon, who has no real 
words expressing such Ideas. Occasionally, the 
glosses " Yup " and " Nop " are heard, it is 
true, though seldom In really cultured circles. 
I pass over such minor errors as " biscuit " for 
" crackers " and " 111 " for " sick," because even 
in England the best people are beginning to 
realise the folly of such insularities. 

171 



A Vagabond in New York 



If you go farther and wish to be accepted 
not only as American, but as one of the rarest 
creatures on God's green earth, a native-born 
New Yorker, you must remember yet one thing 
more, always to pronounce " th " as " d." If 
you wish to say that you were looking for three 
thousand Thespian thieves in Third Avenue, 
you must say that you were watching out for 
dree dousand Despian dieves — only you would 
not say thieves at all, but politicians or State 
Senators, or smart business men, or something 
like that. You would say " on Third Avenue," 
by the way, and never " in." I suppose this 
curious treatment of the " th " comes from the 
enormous number of German immigrants in 
New York, just as does the word " boob," 
meaning — well, all sorts of things. " He is 
some boob," for instance, means that he fancies 
himself quite considerably. There is nothing 
guttural about the "th"; It is a pure, clean 
" d," and very characteristic. 

To become a graduate In American slang Is 
of the simplest. I think I may say without 
boasting that I was for a time emeritus pro- 

172 



A Son of the Empire 



fessor in the Macgregor University of Eighth 
Avenue. I picked up an old copy — I think 
it was in the Bohn edition — of the Vision of 
Piers Plowman — at a second-hand book-store 
on Forty-second Street and quoted at random. 
You will also find much useful information in 
Roger Occam, while I understand, though I can 
speak only from hearsay, that the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle Is a very mine of up-to-the-hour 
Americanisms. 

I fear that I am wandering somewhat from 
the path of my vagabondage, but so I actually 
did in real life when I tended bar for Mr. Mac- 
gregor. I occupied, so to put It, a place of 
profit under Government, a hillock of ease 
whereon to rest and look back over the devious 
wanderings of the past few months. Mine 
again was a position analogous to that of a po- 
liceman on point duty outside Charing Cross 
Station, In that at least a very large section of 
New York passed daily under my survey. Es- 
pecially, of course, I was Interested In the Eng- 
glishmen among our patrons. The number of 
Englishmen in New York Is really surprising. 

173 



A Vagabond in New York 

It is pathetic, too, when you come to realise how 
many of them have drifted there, after failing 
elsewhere, with some vague hope that it is an 
Eldorado where they can repair their damaged 
fortunes. We have been told, ad nauseam, 
that the Americans hate, despise, envy, con- 
temn the English. This and similar statements 
are absolutely untrue, so far at least as my 
experience goes, but if it were so it would 
scarcely be surprising so far as New York is 
concerned, seeing how large a proportion of the 
Englishmen seen there are " unemployables " — - 
at either end of the social scale. The capable 
Englishman goes West; if he stays in New 
York, where there is really no room for him, 
he is not capable. I stayed in New York, my- 
self, so I know. 

If the New Yorker — and especially the 
lower class New Yorker — does not hate Eng- 
land and the English, it is not for want of en- 
couragement. The reason is curious enough 
and has very little to do with Irish Nationalist 
sentiment, though that of course helps. But it 
is chiefly a matter of business. 

174 



A Son of the Empire 



New York has notoriously its gutter press — 
not more guttery though than is its counterpart 
in England. It devotes itself to supplying 
strong meats for the baser part of the populace. 
They are for the most part Finns, Wallachs, 
Lithuanians, and a hundred other weird peoples 
whose very names are scarcely known to us ex- 
cept in fits of depression. The papers who 
pander to them are forced to attack England, 
if they would gain their pennies, for two rea- 
sons, both unexpected. In the first place 
patriotism pays, in America as elsewhere, 
perhaps even a little more; and it is the patriotic 
duty of every American paper to uphold the 
banner of America against all comers — as one 
can only wish were also the case in England. 
Now, a very good way of praising your own 
country is to compare it favourably with its 
foreign sisters. You could not gain any 
national kudos by pointing out American su- 
periority over Moldo-Wallachia or Crim Tar- 
tary; you would only be insulting America by 
condescending to such a comparison. You must 
select a more or less worthy rival to give your 

175 



A Vagabond in New York 

words some weight. England is the one coun- 
try in the world which America regards as a 
worthy rival. Therefore, when the gutter press 
upholds America at the expense of the outer 
world, England has to bear the brunt of It. 
Thus the foreign-born American Is gradually 
being educated to believe that England com- 
prises within herself every national quality 
which compares unfavourably with her trans- 
atlantic daughter. The native-born American 
does not think so for a moment; with very few 
exceptions he admires England and likes the 
English, but he has other things to do than to 
spend his time protesting that liking. 

Another reason which tends towards gutter- 
abuse of England is the race- war, which has al- 
ready broken out In the United States and 
which in a very few years, unless wisely dealt 
with, may produce serious results. Perhaps 
less in New York than elsewhere, but very per- 
ceptible there also, Is the striking fact that 
all the men of action have English, or more 
strictly British, names. The financier or the 
capitalist is very often, though not Invariably, 

176 



A Son of the Empire 



German or Jewish. But the director, the fore- 
man, the manager, the supervisor who comes 
into personal contact with the working-class, Is 
in the vast majority of cases of British descent. 
The working-class, which Is largely recruited 
from the weird under-nations already referred 
to, does not consider Itself well-treated. Per- 
sonally I quite agree with It, though I need not 
go Into that. Whether or no, the man upon 
whose shoulders It places the responsibility for 
Its sufferings Is that representative of the ruling 
caste with whom it is brought into personal con- 
tact — the man of British descent. Ex pede 
Herculem. 

At the upper end of the social scale there is 
certainly little anti-British prejudice. On the 
contrary, the one Indispensable condition of so- 
cial success Is to have a British name. Armed 
with that you have always the chance of being 
recognised as an F.F.V., which Is to say, the 
scion of one of the first families of Virginia, 
which Is to say, a descendant of Cavaliers and 
an acceptable candidate for membership in the 
Thames Valley Legitimist League or the White 

177 



A Vagabond in New York 

Rose Society or other combination of Die-Hard 
Jacobites. Failing that, your ancestors came 
over in the May/lower, which, as has now been 
proved by the researches of the Smithsonian In- 
stitute, was a vessel of about double the size of 
the Imperator, and crowded at that. If you 
are unlucky enough not to have an English name 
— but your son always has, so we need not go 
into that. For some curious reason, it is better 
to have had an English great-grandfather than 
an English father. If, I mean, your father 
was born in Putney, you conceal it, or pretend 
that it was not Putney, England, but Putney, 
Massachusetts. If it was your grandfather, 
you regard Massachusetts or Surrey with equal 
equanimity. But if it was your great-grand- 
father — then there is no holding you ; you 
subscribe on the slightest encouragement, or 
none at all, to funds for the restoration of Put- 
ney Parish Church, and if you have not had 
eighteen generations of crusading ancestors 
buried there before your fiftieth birthday you 
are no true American. 

178 



A Son of the Empire 



My coloured cousin Euphemia was a suffi- 
ciently good example of the spiritual empire 
wielded by England in another direction. I 
came across one still more suggestive in the 
days when I was trying to be a journalist. He 
was an Englishman named Ah Wong LI. 

I had been sent to Chinatown, which is the 
place where the Chinese live, to get up, if I 
could, a picturesque story concerning a shooting 
affair which had just taken place there. One 
of the best assets of the New York paper is the 
Tong. No New York paper ever gives any 
more news than It can help about anything that 
happens outside New York. If the German 
Emperor, the Tsar, and the French President 
murdered each other after a drinking bout, the 
most enterprising New York dally would give 
the affair three lines, tucked away under an ac- 
count of how little Flossie Yammerheim, of 
Avenue A, had won a cooking prize at school, 
developed Into three columns by the help of 
Interviews with her teacher, the local Rabbi, 
and the delicatessen storekeeper who provided 

179 



A Vagabond in New York 

the materials. The next most enterprising 
journal would give the Yuropian holocaust one 
line ; the rest would not refer to it at all. The 
New York public cares only for what happens 
in New York, and, of course, In Mayfair, which 
is, however, no more than a suburb of Manhat- 
tan. Now the Tong — which is a Chinese 
Secret Society — is New Yorkian and Oriental 
and picturesque all at the same time. And It 
Is always killing itself or its rivals, which ren- 
ders it even more eligible. So I was sent to 
Mott Street to get the details of an affair In 
which seven Chinamen shot each other dead In 
a laundry, and five were wounded. And there 
I met Ah Wong LI. He was the secretary of 
a flourishing co-operative murder society, and 
he was very English Indeed. He had been 
educated in Berkshire — he was born In Hong 
Kong — and he had a contempt for any one not 
born under the British flag that was quite colos- 
sal. The thing that interested him most, apart 
from the restaurant which he owned, was Im- 
perial Federation. I shall never forget the 

i8o 




I was sent to Alott Street to get the details uf an affair. 



A Son of the Empire 



contempt with which he spoke to another 
EngHshman of Chinese descent, who, however, 
was only brought to Hong Kong at the age of 
two, having been born, by an oversight, some- 
where in Mongolia. 



i$i 



CHAPTER XFII 

Under the Red Light 



THERE are only three people In New 
York who do not profess them- 
selves able to give you full and 
authentic Inside knowledge of the genesis of 
all police scandals, present, past, and to come. 
They are all high police officials, and I am not 
one of them. I really did get some little in- 
sight Into the " Red Light " system at first hand 
when, for a time, I acted as assistant door- 
keeper at a gambling-hell In the West Forties. 
That was after I had left Macgregor's saloon, 
when my vaudeville venture had failed lamen- 
tably, and while I was still trying to be a jour- 
nalist. 

It was a regular customer at the cafe who 
first induced me to tempt fortune in vaudeville. 
He was an American — one of the few I ever 

182 



Under the Bed Light 



saw in New York — which meant, of course, 
that he had a scheme for cornering the whole 
vaudeville business in the United States, Great 
Britain being regarded as one of the minor ter- 
ritories. He worked it out down to its smallest 
details at late sittings in the Family Depart- 
ment, and I have no doubt that it would have 
turned out a marvellous success if he had been 
able to raise the five dollars necessary for pro- 
curing properly stamped notepaper — an essen- 
tial preliminary to commercial success in 
America. I did not regret my temporary con- 
nection with him, because it threw me into 
fortuitous contact with a man who really did 
manage one of the minor halls on the East Side, 
and under his auspices I made my first appear- 
ance in vaudeville. It only lasted for a week, 
and I cannot say that it had any very pronounced 
success, but it was quite good fun while it lasted. 
I worked the turn with Miss Lamartine, whose 
name you may remember. She is extremely 
small; I have been called stout by my enemies, 
and am rather on the tall side. I was dressed 
as a baby in long clothes, and Miss Lamartine, 

183 



A Vagabond in New York 

attired as the vaudevillists' idea of a nursemaid, 
pushed me on to the stage in the American 
apology for a perambulator, and we sang songs 
and spouted patter and that sort of thing. I 
think we enjoyed it more than the audience did, 
because, being mostly Greeks and Italians and 
Russian Jews, I doubt if they understood what 
we said; but they were very nice about it, and 
there were no riots or anything unpleasant. 
We were not able to get any re-engagements, 
though, so the speculation came to an end. I 
can't say that I learned very much about the 
American music-hall stage in the time; the only 
difference I could see was that, while In England 
you do not call your fellow-artists by their Chris- 
tian names until you have exchanged at least 
three words, in America you address even your 
business letters to people you have never seen 
with some endearing diminutive, and close with 
love and innumerable kisses. 

I had been wise enough not to drop my small 
journalistic connection In the meantime, but all 
the same I began looking for another job at 
once. The free-lance has, if possible, a worse 

184 



Under the Red Light 



time in New York than in London, so far as 
getting paid goes. In London, of course, they 
often make you wait six weeks for your money, 
putting the responsibility for your meals in the 
meantime on the broad shoulders of the C.O.S. 
In New York it frequently runs to three months 
— or did in my case — and the better class the 
paper the longer you have to wait. I did some 
articles for what is generally considered the best 
daily in New York. After nine weeks I asked 
for the money. The man I asked was quite 
annoyed about it, and said I ought to know 
better than to worry them about such little 
things. I tried hard for another three weeks, 
and then was told they could not trace the trans- 
action at all. In the end I got the money by 
going up to the proprietor's room on the 
twenty-third floor, sitting on the threshold and 
moaning through the keyhole. He said it got 
on his nerves, after two hours, and gave me an 
order on the cashier. I have never had to do 
that, even in Carteret — I mean in London. 

It was through my journalism that I became 
a gambling-hell official. I wanted to make my- 

185 



A Vagabond in New York 

self favourably known in other ways than by 
emulating Lazarus. I went to my old patron 
Officer Dempsey and asked for suggestions, 
and he got me the job. It was in a plain 
brown freestone house in one of the semi-resi- 
dential streets between Sixth Avenue and 
Broadway. Most of the gaming places and 
disorderly houses and all-night sing-songs are 
clustered about there, along with theatrical 
lodging houses and cheap restaurants — a sort 
of New York Shaftesbury Avenue, in fact. 
Ours was a very discreet establishment with 
lace curtains in the windows, and a high flight 
of steps running up to the front door. It was 
owned by an alderman, and the upper part was 
let out in lodgings to theatre people. We oc- 
cupied only the basement and the ground floor. 
Like other lawless places in New York it was 
run on lines of almost monastic respectability, 
voices scarcely raised above a whisper until 
pretty early in the morning, drunken men put 
comfortably to bed on sofas in an ante-room, 
and that sort of thing. We had a higher-class 
connection than most of our rivals, and for 

1 86 



Under the Red Light 



rather a curious reason; the police on duty 
never directed any chance customers our way, 
everything was done by introduction. In the 
ordinary way, when you feel like gambling or 
otherwise amusing yourself disreputably in 
New York you make for that section of Broad- 
way between the corner of Central Park — 
Fifty-ninth Street If I remember aright — and 
Macey's — popularly known as the " Great 
White Way," because of Its electric flashlight 
advertisements — and ask the first policeman 
you come across where to go, and he gives you 
a list of addresses. You can ask a taxi-driver, 
If you prefer it, but the establishments he rec- 
ommends are not usually of the first-class. 

Now the reason that my particular hell was 
not recommended by the police was that It was 
not officially a gambling house at all. The al- 
derman and other highly placed gentlemen who 
own the Vice Trust have, of course, reduced It 
to a very exact business, of which each branch 
keeps strictly to its own affairs. Thus an 
alderman who runs gambling-hells Is not sup- 
posed to dabble In disorderly houses; if he does, 

187 



A Vagabond in New York 



it must be secretly and at the risk of being 
raided by the police, as not paying the appro- 
priate rates of blackmail. Our proprietor nomi- 
nally confined his activities to the White Slave 
side of the business, in which he was what you 
might call the managing director. But he was 
of a Napoleonic turn of mind, and yearned also 
after the profits — reported to be higher — of 
the gambling side. Hence we were nominally 
a disorderly house and as such described in the 
official records — and only paid that scale of 
blackmail, the lower of the two. Consequently 
we were extremely discreet and well-managed. 
In that particular block you might, every night 
regularly, Sundays included, hear the strains of 
" Everybody's Doing It " wafted to heaven 
from innumerable gramophones, from mid- 
night to nine or ten next morning; you might 
hear drunken choruses, feminine screams of 
" Murder," and other sounds of gaiety, at all 
hours. But never from our house. We 
might have been a community of bishops for 
any sign to the contrary. 

We were not raided while I was there, and 

i88 



Ufider the Red Light 



there were no disturbances of any kind. The 
life, in fact, was deadly dull, although the pay 
was good; and I learnt how to play quite a 
number of games hitherto unknown to me. 
But the champagne was execrable — some 
abominable Californian brand put up in Perrler 
Jouet bottles — and I was afraid of diabetes 
and left. 



189 



CHAPTER XVIII 

In the Matter of Manners 



THERE are many Englishmen — 
some of whom have been there — 
who quite conscientiously maintain 
that the street-manners of New York are the 
worst prevailing in any great city. There are 
a number of New Yorkers who will tell you, 
equally conscientiously, the same of London. 
So Paris sneers at Berlin and Berlin at Paris, 
and I suppose Pekin at Tokio and vice-versa. 
What is more they are all perfectly correct ac- 
cording to their lights. London points with 
pride to the theatre-queue; Berlin rejoices in the 
feline smile with which its inhabitants remove 
their hats on entering a shop; Paris will say 
and truly that its most uncultured Apache takes 
off a victim with a grace unknown in brutaller 
climes; New York might claim, if It liked — 

190 



In the Matter of Manners 



though it is too busy abusing him for things that 
he can't help — that the manner of Officer 
Dempsey towards a harassed foreigner is the 
kindliest form of courtesy anywhere to be 
found. The Parisian does not barge his way 
into a tram-car on a wet day — because a 
kindly administration provides him with a duly 
numbered ticket — but watch him on the out- 
skirts of a crowd when he wants to see the 
centre of Interest. The Englishman will cold- 
shoulder his railway companion, boorishly, be- 
cause he is shy and self-conscious; the American 
will lean across the aisle and speculate upon the 
price you have paid for your overcoat, be- 
cause he really takes a friendly interest in you. 
Each of them will think the other appallingly 
rude, and each will be quite right and very 
wrong. 

I am acknowledged, in England, to have 
really charming manners. I say this, not in 
any spirit of petty pride, but because It Illus- 
trates my point. A New York acquaintance, 
long since become a friend, has assured me 
that when I was first introduced to him, at his 

191 



A Vagabond in New York 

club, he disliked me cordially, setting me down 
as prig, oaf, boor and I know not what beside. 
When I asked him upon what he had based this 
unfavourable verdict he replied: "Because, 
from your manner, I thought you must be 
God's first cousin." Passing over the fact that 
such a Personage would probably have excel- 
lent manners, that I laid no claim to such re- 
lationship and that I never met an Englishman 
who did, except he imply it in the well-founded 
belief that English is the only language spoken 
in heaven, I will only say that at the time 
I was doing my very best to make a favourable 
Impression. I am not, of course, by a very 
long way, the only Englishman who has unwit- 
tingly gained for himself a similar reputation 
in New York. In my case, as it fortunately or 
unfortunately happened, the Fates busied them- 
selves to impress upon me that so far from 
being a demigod I was no more than the 
humblest vagabond that creeps the earth. 
Many Englishmen never have this brought to 
their notice and they go through the world, 
quite unaware of the claim they appear to be 

192 



In the Matter of Manners 



making to divine honours — and so create for 
all their countrymen an uncomplimentary 
legend that sticks. 

The Englishman usually considers New 
York a home of incivility because he is socially 
and psychologically out of his element. He 
expects, from those whom at home he is ac- 
customed to consider his inferiors, a degree of 
deference to which no American — however 
humble his status — would admit his right. If 
he would only regard the policeman, the tram- 
conductor, the railway guard as a man and a 
brother, he would find them individually charm- 
ing. But he judges them by their uniforms 
and expects from them the deference paid by 
a private in parade kit to a subaltern in mufti. 
Contrariwise, the American in England dis- 
covers in people of those same occupations a 
manner which strikes him as subservient, 
servile, even cringing. It is not so in reality, 
because it is only a uniform, put on for the 
moment in deference to custom, but acknowl- 
edged by all parties to be no more than a uni- 
form. The footman in livery who should find 

193 



A Vagabond in New York 

himself treated as a man and a brother by some 
American guest at his master's house would 
consider himself, and very properly, insulted. 
One does not speak to the man at the wheel; 
and he is for the time at the wheel, guiding the 
social ship along its appointed track. Once In 
plain clothes and the case is altered; he will 
hob-nob with you and treat you well as a free 
Englishman should and does treat the stranger 
within his gates — and uncommonly good com- 
pany you will find him. 

Broadly speaking you will never decide 
whether the American or the Englishman, the 
Parisian or the Berliner or the Cypriote or the 
Tibetan, Is the best-mannered until you can 
establish a fixed basis of absolute value which 
will cover soap and beer and creamcheese and 
moonlight and poetry and prose. But it Is 
possible to establish an Internal standard In 
each and all. So far as it is possible for an 
outsider to gauge the matter the New Yorker 
would have no reputation for bad manners 
anywhere In the world, for his scale, being 
based upon the common humanity of human 

194 



In the Matter of Manners 



beings, Is a high one, were it not that he re- 
joices — really rejoices — in one particular 
sect or creed or religion who make it their 
business in life to cultivate bad manners to 
their logical conclusion. I refer, of course, as 
anyone who has ever lived in New York will 
know already — to the men who work the ele- 
vators in the big public buildings. 

As I was, after abandoning my employment 
in the gambling world, for a time a member of 
that profession I can speak with some au- 
thority. I do not think any other trade or pro- 
fession in the world could seriously challenge 
the supremacy of the New York elevator- 
attendant. I know, of course, that the young 
duchesses employed in those " lunch " estab- 
lishments which correspond to our tea-shops 
deserve honourable mention. They are very 
rude indeed and haughty — a shade more so I 
think than the staff of a temperance hotel in 
England — but they are, after all, young 
women, and of a class from which one expects 
little courtesy, unless one is a nut, dude, or 
buck. Also they may be put to shame; which 

195 



A Vagabond in New York 

certainly can be said of no liftman anywhere in 
the Union. I saw a neat rout of this kind in 
one of Child's lunch places — popularly known 
as the "Cafe des Enfants " — near Times 
Square. A Frenchman, obviously a new im- 
portation, was paying his bill at the cash desk. 
The girl flung him a nickel change, so care- 
lessly that it rolled back, through the little 
grille to a place under her elbow where it was 
almost impossible to retrieve it from without. 
The Frenchman waited for her to hand it back 
to him, but she only regarded him with the air 
of bovine oft'ensiveness which is the trade-mark 
of her sex and class throughout the world. I 
have often wondered why this should be so, 
why, I mean, the young woman employed in a 
post-office or a telephone exchange or a tea- 
shop, or a temperance hotel — though not in a 
public-house, where I suppose the softening in- 
fluence of alcoholic association makes her more 
genial — should be so ubiquitously offensive to 
everyone who is not her personal friend of the 
other sex. Is it that she believes it " lady- 
like?" Or that she knows herself for the 

196 



In the Matter of Manners 



poor defenceless little creature that she is and 
like a gecko lizard assumes for defence the 
guise of a ravaging dragon. Is it — but I am 
wandering from the point. 

The Frenchman, then, waited for a while 
and at last, removing his hat, bowed and smiled 
affably. *' You may keep it, my good girl," 
he said, " as the reward of your politeness." 
I was next to him in the queue of filled cus- 
tomers waiting to pay, and it pleased me greatly 
to watch the young woman grow purple to the 
ears and hand across the nickel without a word. 
An elevator-man would not have been con- 
fused. He would have pocketed the coin and 
cursed the Frenchman because it was not more. 
I am Inclined to think that, by some secret 
Trade Union regulation, elevator-attendants 
always marry young ladies employed in tea- 
shops, and that the daughters always follow the 
mother's profession, while the sons become 
either liftmen or hotel bell-boys. T do not 
know whether this is actually the case, because 
while I was an elevator attendant I never hap- 
pened to be on Intimate terms with a " lunch " 

197 



A Vagabond in New York 

waitress, nor do I know if it is peculiar to New 
York or also in operation in London. I shall 
find out in time. It is such speculations as 
these that make the vagabond's life interesting 
if not lucrative. 

If, as I suppose, hotel bell-boys, promoted on 
attaining maturity to hotel-clerkships, are ac- 
tually the offspring of liftmen — (It is curious 
by the way how " hustling " America always 
prefers the longer of two words while lazy, 
effete England selects the shorter) — and of 
tea-shop girls, they are in some degree an ex- 
ample of atavism. Bell-boy, hotel-clerk and, 
to a lesser degree, waiter, are all alike tainted 
with the un-American vice of servility and must, 
therefore, granted the correctness of my sug- 
gested pedigree, throw back to some remote 
European forebear — perhaps the warder of a 
feudal castle. They are insolent only inter- 
mittently; before the guest of proven wealth 
they grovel with a subservience elsewhere un- 
known. The elevator-man, on the other hand, 
is insolent to rich and poor alike, to the million- 
aire as to the clerk, to the pretty girl as to the 

198 



In the Matter of Manners 



faded female with six parcels and a string bag. 
It is with him a cult, a duty, a religion. I be- 
lieve — I do not know, for I was never ad- 
mitted to the inner mysteries of the profession 
— that there is some hidden God of Insolence 
to whom he offers incense before going on duty, 
as did the devotees of Thuggism to the red god- 
dess Kali. There is something very admirable 
in this fidelity to an ideal — seen from a dis- 
tance of seven thousand miles or so. Unfortu- 
nately, here and there is to be found a traitor. 
Four several times in my experience have I come 
across an elevator-attendant approximating in 
manners and deportments to the ordinary hu- 
man being outside the Mysteries. It is true 
that, without exception, they were only coloured 
men. 

It was by the merest chance that I became 
a deputy-elevator man. After I left my 
Tenderloin job I wandered down to Mac- 
gregor's saloon to see if there was anything 
going, and there I met with Mr. Mooney. It 
is a curious detail, by the way, that I never 
met an elevator-man who was not of pure 

199 



A Vagabond in New York 



British descent, except of course the coloured 
men, and even they were Barbadians. Upon 
the events, simple as they were, of that one 
evening, I might base a whole essay upon the 
advantages of America over any European 
country you care to mention as a place of resi- 
dence when you are out of work and honestly 
looking for it. I was not inside the saloon for 
more than half-an-hour, yet within that time I 
had two spontaneous offers of employment, 
both offering at least a living wage. I wonder 
how many public-houses you might enter, say 
in Southwark, before you received even one. 
Yet New York is generally said by the rest, and 
especially the West of the continent, to be the 
grave of hopes, so far as making a living is 
concerned and a poor man in question. 

The first offer came from a " boy " employed 
by the Western Union Telegraph Company. 
I call him a boy, because so he called himself, 
though he was at least sixty-five, very grizzled 
and inextricably wrinkled. I foregathered 
with him several times previously and we found 
a common interest in, of all things in the world, 

200 



In the Matter of M miners 



superstition and the history of witchcraft. I 
once wrote a very clever book about it — it Is 
still on sale, I have no doubt, if anyone cares to 
buy It. Denier, as my boyish friend was 
called, had thought about it — more deeply, I 
fear, than ever I did — and so we became 
friends. That Is another unexpected side to 
New York. Imagine dropping into the public 
bar of the " King's Arms " in Lower Sloane 
Street and meeting there a casual labourer In- 
terested in the Cabbala and the Rosy Cross. 

Denier's offer was that of dog-leader. A 
wealthy lady of Madison Avenue had four 
dogs who suffered from indigestion through 
lack of exercise. Their former attendant had 
been dismissed at short notice, having con- 
tracted a cold in the head and a habit of snif- 
fing, which was bad for the nerves of his 
charges. The hours were few, the occupation 
light — no more than strolling in Central Park, 
— and the pay good. I was not starving at the 
moment, though, and so I declined and two 
minutes later I was Introduced to Mr. Mooney. 

Mr. Mooney was what I may describe as the 

201 



A Vagabond in New York 

Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General of the ele- 
vator service in a huge Broadway building that 
had eight sets of lifts running at once. He 
was a small person, with a game leg and an ex- 
pression of determined malevolence that was 
purely professional. Naturally he was very 
amiable, as I found when he gave up at least 
an hour to explaining to me the details of my 
duty, though it was not at all his own to do so. 
One of his subordinates was laid up with a sud- 
den chill, and he was watching out for a sub- 
stitute; and I happened to come along at the 
right moment, and Mr. Macgregor vouched for 
me and I was engaged on the spot. 

I had no idea at first of my own good for- 
tune. There is, the poet has told us, no greater 
happiness than is provided by satisfied hatred. 
I was to experience It. The building over 
whose lifts Mr. Mooney reigned, with a 
crooked ash-stick for sceptre (about which he 
had a marvellous tale to tell, including two 
murders and an heroic rescue) — housed the 
ofl'ices of a great daily paper with which I had 
been connected at the time of my first arrival 

202 



In the Matter of Manners 



in America and against whose money editor, 
city editor and editor-in-chief I had three 
separate and distinct grudges. Let me here 
remark upon one peculiarity of newspaper life 
in America. A newspaper staff consists en- 
tirely of editors. From the smallest boy .who 
carries messages, up through all the grades 
which we should know as compositors and 
proof-readers and reporters and sub-editors 
and managers, in America there are none but 
editors. They start at the top with about 
twelve editors-in-chief and work down to a reg- 
iment of editresses corresponding to char- 
women in London, but transatlantically known 
as scrub-lady editresses. When I was working 
express elevator No. 6 I became, without 
knowing it, an editor — assistant-express-ele- 
vator-editor I think it was officially called — 
from the fifteenth to the twenty-third floors, on 
which the newspaper offices were situated. 
Below them I lapsed, as It were, into private 
life again. 

If satisfied revenge Is the highest human hap- 
piness I certainly attained It In that editorial 

203 



A Vagabond in New York 



post. Being the express, which was to say the 
fastest running of the elevators, It was that 
most used by my fellow-editors. On the very 
first day I carried upwards, in one load, my 
three old-time enemies. By a still more re- 
markable coincidence that elevator broke down 
between the sixth and seventh floors and stuck 
there. It stuck for something like twenty min- 
utes, and all that time I was in the happy posi- 
tion of an Early Christian lion surrounded by 
martyrs. I had them all on their knees, and 
two of them in tears, before I let them out. 

I did not keep that post very long — having 
been appointed only as a stop-gap — but I 
think I can honestly say that I did nothing to 
lower the high standard of the profession in 
the way of ill-manners. It was curious how 
natural they became and how soon. On my 
first day I several times as nearly as possible 
disgraced myself for good and all. An old 
gentleman, I remember, who was carrying a 
number of parcels, dropped one, and I picked 
It up and handed It to him. Fortunately none 
of my colleagues saw me — It happened on the 

204 



In the Matter of Manners 



entrance floor; but I still remember the flush 
of shame that came over me at the thought of 
how I had betrayed them. Twenty-four hours 
later an old lady slipped as she entered and 
nearly fell. I felt the Impulse to go to her as- 
sistance, but mastered It In time. By the third 
day if all the old ladles In Manhattan had 
fallen round me In sheafs and been in Imminent 
danger I should have jeered at them with abso- 
lute spontaneity. 

Why this should be I have never been able 
to decide — the inevitable rudeness of the New 
York liftman, I mean, A policeman has as 
much power — yet he is always amiable ; a 
bar-tender is as much respected — yet he is the 
essence of politeness. I believed for a time 
that electricity might have something to do 
with it, yet the hydraulic liftman is as rude as 
any of his fellows. Only one clue I have dis- 
covered. Those in charge of express eleva- 
tors are, speaking generally, ruder than their 
" calling at every floor " brethren. Possibly 
the rush of blood to the head — and feet — 
consequent upon continual careering up and 

205 



A Vagabond in New York 

down at great speed may have something to do 
with it. Some day I am going to study the 
English liftman and his manners, and perhaps, 
with his help, evolve a theory. 

As I say, my experience was but short, yet It 
will always be a satisfaction to remember that 
I was for a time a member of a caste quite su- 
perior to the ordinary decencies of life, and 
one which, rightly or wrongly, has been en- 
abled to erect its personal and trade idiosyn- 
crasy into an international legend. 



206 



CHAPTER XIX 

'Follow the Crowd" 



WHILE I was in New York the 
gentleman ubiquitously known — 
and loved in some places — as 
'* Boss Croker," happened to return from Eu- 
rope where, for some reason best known to 
himself, he now elects to live. He was, of 
course, welcomed by many reporters and to 
them he loosed one gem of thought, which I 
have ever since remembered. It was that he 
thanked God he had again returned to a city 
conducted on modern and progressive lines. 

Of course Mr. Croker is a better judge of 
municipal management than I could ever hope 
to be. I have been told that he has freely 
expended his life and his intelligence and his 
large private fortune on the furtherance of 
purity and the stamping out of " graft " and 

207 



A Vagabond in New York 

similar abuses in municipal life. I had in- 
tended therefore to refer to him as a typical 
American citizen, had not another American 
citizen, who is my very good friend, practically 
threatened me with personal violence if I did 
anything of the sort. 

As a mere outsider and looker-on I do not 
profess to understand the rights of this. I 
will therefore only say that, while I do not al- 
together agree with the anti-European in- 
nuendo contained in the Great Thought I have 
quoted, I am thoroughly in agreement with 
what Mr. Croker went on to say: That New 
York beyond all other cities exemplifies the 
progress of democracy. In so far as the aim 
and end of democracy is to exalt the crowd 
above the individual, New York can certainly 
give points even to Glasgow, with Manchester 
a bad third and London altogether out of the 
running. 

I am not, for my sins, a believer in demo- 
cracy. My own little preference in the way of 
government, if I had any voice in the matter, 
which thank God I never had, would be for a 

208 



'Follow the Crowd' 



benevolent despotism tempered by assassina- 
tion, I believe, I mean, that it is better for ten 
thousand ciphers to die if thereby One M'an 
may be brought to perfect fruition. But in 
this I know that I am very silly, even impious, 
and that when I get to the next world it will 
be proved to me, painfully. Be that as it may, 
New York is to me the most interesting of the 
modern cities with which I have any personal 
acquaintance because it does, more than any of 
its sister-capitals, exemplify that side of 
democracy which entails, not all for one, but 
one for all. 

We laugh, in London loudly, in New York 
more discreetly — by "we" I mean the peo- 
ple who make their living out of the public 
by pandering to its preferences — at the 
" rubberer," angl'ice the man whose neck, 
through constant straining to see over the heads 
of the crowd, has become elastic. Yet he typi- 
fies the whole community, as, in the future, I 
suppose, the whole democratic world. I can 
speak with authority, because I was for a time 
one of the objects of his most earnest regard. 

209 



A Vagabond in New York 

That is to say that after I left my post as dep- 
uty-assistant-express-elevator-editor, I sat for 
three weeks in the window of a shop on Broad- 
way illustrating the virtues of a razor strop. 
It was really a very good razor strop, though 
after a time I became prejudiced against it; 
but I chiefly remember it now as connected 
with innumerable round pink things, like 
anemones in an aquarium, all pressing against 
the outside of the glass, and innumerable 
solemn eyes staring at me like cows. They 
used to fascinate me so much that I forgot al- 
together I was supposed to be cutting shavings 
off blocks of wood with the razors I had sharp- 
ened, and just stared back at them. Not that 
that reduced the crowds; once started they 
would have gone on staring just the same if a 
black cloth had been drawn right across the 
shop front. I won a dollar from a guileless 
New Yorker over that once by a trick very, 
very old in London, but of course new to New 
York. I bet him that I could draw a crowd 
of a thousand people in ten minutes by merely 
standing still. I did it, with minutes to spare, 

2IO 



'Follow tJw Crowd" 



by staring at the corner of a tailor's window. 
I forget whether three or four men were 
clubbed to death before the police could clear 
the sidewalk — four, I think. 

If a London tailor wants to advertise the ex- 
cellence of his wares he endeavours to Intimate 
that they are Intended only for the select few. 
If he Is In New York he sets about It like this: 
^^ Seven million smart young chaps are wearing 
our Ten-Dollar, Ready-to-Wear, Tuxedo Suit- 
ings. Follow the Crowd." They do, too. 
No true New Yorker would think of putting 
on a pair of trousers until he was quite sure 
that at least a million others had preceded him 
In them. In my window, just over my head, 
was a large ticket, setting forth how many 
millions of my razor strop had been sold. 
One of my duties was to be handed a telegram 
every half-hour, to open it with an expression 
of wonder, and to add another half-million to 
the total above me. We began with a mil- 
lion and a-quarter, I remember, and I put my 
foot in it rather badly. It was a new line, only 
put on the market that morning, and I sug- 

211 • 



A Vagabond in 'New York 

gested that it would be just as well to start 
with a really Impressive number — ten or 
twenty million. The shop-manager was very 
much annoyed. He said that the proprietor 
was the head of I forget what religious com- 
munity, and had all his life long set his face 
against business trickery and exaggerations, 
and that if I wanted to deceive the public I had 
better go elsewhere to do it. I did after a bit, 
because there was another store, two blocks 
down, where they wanted a man to recline in 
a newly invented chair and do nothing except 
read a novel, with a little nigger boy to change 
the totals for him, and that struck me as bet- 
ter suited to my capacities. I had to wait, 
though, for a time, because there was a lot of 
competition for the post, and meanwhile I got 
corns all over my palms from the razor han- 
dles. All the same, I was sorry I had changed 
afterwards, when I found I was expected to 
read the same novel over and over again, to 
save wear and tear. It was by Mrs. Hum- 
phrey Ward, and I learned it by heart and 
used to recite it to myself at night, and I think 

212 



'Follow the Crowd' 



I should have gone mad if I had not been 
struck by a bright idea. I suggested to the 
manager that it would go down well with the 
religious public if I were to read something of 
an improving tendency, and he thought well of 
It and got a second-hand Old Testament cheap 
— which would appeal, he said, to Jews and 
Christians alike — and I learned that by heart, 
too, which proved extremely useful later on, 
when I received a call to the ministry — but 
that is a purely private matter. 

I was first struck by the sameness of the demo- 
cratic crowd on noticing one day that all the 
men who were staring at me were wearing 
coats of exactly the same cut and colour, and 
had their lips pursed into exactly the same lines, 
and their hair shaved away behind their ears 
to exactly the same width, and wore their hats 
at exactly the same angle and bent their heads 
over their left shoulders — never the right — 
in exactly the same way. After that I studied 
the matter more closely, and It never varied. 
If one man wore an overcoat they all did, and 
if one man was smoking a particular kind of 

213 



A Vagabond in New York 

cigar they all did — and it was just the same 
with the women. It puzzled me for a time, 
because I did not realise how they were able to 
time the changes so exactly. I found out at 
last that it was through reading the news- 
papers. There was one really terrible spring 
day when half the men I saw were wearing 
straw hats and the other half black billycocks. 
There was a dreadful look of uncertainty on 
their faces, too, and from the side-long way 
they kept looking at each other instead of at 
me, I was afraid there was going to be a revo- 
lution or something. What had really hap- 
pened was that the Evening Journal and the 
Telegram had fallen out over whether Straw- 
Hat day ought to fall on the Wednesday or the 
Thursday. It had something to do with the 
Gregorian Calendar, I think, and the Equinoxes, 
but the result was quite dreadful. I forget 
how many suicides were attributed to that dis- 
pute, owing to the prevalent uncertainty, but 
on the Thursday, when both authorities were 
united in saying that the day had really come 
when straw hats were de rigueur the sigh of 

214 



"Follow the Crowd'' 



relief that went up throughout the City — and 
the State, too, I expect — made Broadway 
sound like the inside of a volcano. 

The real reason for all this is the fierce de- 
sire to be American. If you remember that of 
the whole population of New York only three 
individuals are officially recorded to have been 
born in America at all, that two of them died 
in infancy and the third was electrocuted, you 
will realise that this ideal Is not so easy of 
achievement as it looks, or would not be but 
for the newspapers and the advertising tailors. 
Thanks to them, though, every native-born 
New Yorker as soon as he arrives from Cra- 
cow, Odessa, or Lozengrad, as the case may be, 
no sooner lands than he is seized upon by his 
relatives — or if he have none, by the Immi- 
gration officers — and inducted into the regu- 
lation suit, hat, cut of hair, smile, or frown, 
whichever is for the moment most American — 
and so passes at once into the indistinguishable 
ruck. Within three weeks he has learned to 
think, within a month to speak, in precisely the 
same way as do the rest of his fellow citizens, 

215 



A Vagabond in New York 

and within a year he was born in Jersey City 
and his great-great-grandfather came from 
England. That is one reason why if you make 
a hit in America it is such a very big hit indeed. 
If one man admires a book, or a play, or a rag- 
time melody, or a new brand of Frankfurters 
or religion, the whole population does so unani- 
mously — and contrariwise. It is the same in 
politics and patriotism and morals generally. 
" Follow the crowd," says the native-born New 
Yorker, " and you can't go wrong." 

As the loyal subject of a Monarch, with an 
Established Church, for the moment at any 
rate, a titled aristocracy and a catechism which 
reminds me of my duty towards my betters, I 
might be Inclined to sneer at this, were It not 
that England also to-day exalts Demos to a 
seat among the gods. If we are ready to ad- 
mit — which I for one am not — that Jack Is 
as good as his master and better, too — then 
there can be no question that Mr. Croker has 
the rights of It. We are all going the same 
way and New York Is going a little faster than 
London — and Pekin, If all accounts be true — 

216 



"Follow the Crowd 



>y 



faster than either. Let us then, and all to- 
gether, do our little best to hasten the day 
when, throughout all the world, we shall all 
change felt for straw upon Straw-Hat day. 
Only let us, wherever we may be, see to It that 
someone does not make handsome profit out 
of our fidelity to an impossible Ideal — as It 
may be Is the case to-day In New York and 
nearer home. 



217 



CHAPTER XX 

'Eastward Ho! 



EXPERIENCE is, I have no doubt, 
very useful in the art of steam-ship 
stoking if you propose to adopt it as 
your permanent profession; which you do not, 
except as an alternative to a life sentence or 
the electric chair. If you approach it only as 
an amateur, you can get along without any very 
great skill. You need a lot of strength in your 
arms, though, and a sound heart, lungs and 
other Incidentals. If you are predisposed to 
bad colds in the head, you will find it healthier 
to commit a murder, after all. 

Nevertheless, a stoker, so far as my per- 
sonal experience goes, has many advantages. 
For one thing, he does not have to wash. He 
may If he wishes to, of course — I never heard 
of any regulation against it — but as nothing 

218 



Eastward Ho! 



short of flaying would make any difference, he 
does not usually worry about it. Similarly, 
he does not have to think about clothes. He 
generally wears an eyeglass and a smile, or 
something like that, unless he Is very proud of 
his figure, which I personally am not, but they 
are at best a vanity. Lastly, he Is treated by 
his superior officers, captains, pursers, engi- 
neers and the like, as though he were a duke. 
I know that such is not the popular impression, 
but I speak from personal knowledge. It is 
true that when I assisted to work a certain 
Atlantic liner that shall be nameless eastward 
from New York, I was one of a happy family 
of what are known In American labour circles 
as " scabs " or in England as blacklegs. 

It was by accident rather than design that I 
became a stoker and a scab. I was doing 
fairly well in New York at the time, which is 
to say that I quite frequently had enough to 
eat. What is more I had excellent prospects. 
More fortunate even than the proverbial ass 
I had three distinct avenues of occupation open 
before me. I had the chance — yes, really — 

219 



A Vagabond in New York 

of entering the ministry. It came from Con- 
necticut, through my old friend Mr. Wolff, 
who wrote that he believed me to have hidden 
somewhere deep within me the means of grace; 
and that two of the bears were dead, and that 
a third had got into trouble through trying to 
embrace the wife of a leading member of the 
flock. Then through a chance meeting with 
Cap Lane, who was on his way to get married, 
I heard that Helga's father had made a stand- 
ing offer to give me employment in his business, 
which had something to do with typewriting. 
I learnt from Cap Lane, by the way, that Helga 
herself had assured him that I was a Russian 
Prince fleeing from the displeasure of my uncle 
the Tsar, so it was clear to me that her health 
had not suffered from immersion. My friend 
Dempsey was back on his beat again and when 
I told him how I had been mistaken for a de- 
tective at Amicus, he suggested that, granted 
a sufficient " pull," towards which he thought 
he might himself assist me, I might enter the 
police-force with good prospects of becoming 
a "sleuth" in actual fact. 

220 



Eastward Hot 



My prospects were thus at their brightest at 
the moment I left New York, though only as 
I hope temporarily. Unable to decide between 
the various dazzling prospects opening out be- 
fore me, I temporised. They were expecting 
a strike on at one of the big hotels Central 
Park way. There usually is of course an hotel 
strike on hand in New York, but I happened to 
hear of this through a man I met at Mac- 
gregor's. They expected to want temporary 
waiters for a week or two and it occurred to me 
that I wanted a dress suit. The strike was not 
to be declared for a fortnight or so, and while 
the New York tailors obstinately refused to 
give me credit I knew there was one in London 
upon whose infinite credulity I thought I could 
still build. I calculated I should just have 
time to see London again, get some clothes 
and be back in time to report for work. 

Just then, by some oversight, one of the 
newspapers paid me some money it owed me, 
which, with the eighty-five cents I had saved up, 
made up enough for the return trip, steerage. 

That decided me and I went off to book my 

221 



A Vagabond in New York 

passage and just in time I heard of that heaven- 
sent seamen's strike, and so I got my passage 
and fifteen dollars as well. Glory be! Inci- 
dentally I was fifty times better off as a stoker 
than were the unhappy steerage passengers 
who had paid about a pound a day each for the 
privilege of being bullied. 

I suppose there never was such a mixed 
crowd of stokers since the days of Noah. The 
authorities of the line were very anxious to get 
the boat over to England, where there was no 
strike and they could count on getting a crew, 
so they took anyone they could get. Many of 
us had never been to sea before, and as the 
passage was on the rough side, the scenes in 
the stoke-hold the first and second days out 
would require the pen of a lady novelist to do 
them justice. We took eleven days on the 
voyage instead of seven, and by the time we 
reached port most of us were convalescent. I 
was very popular with my superiors, because I 
was fool enough not to tumble to the idea of 
being sea-sick until it was too late, and really 
did quite a lot of shovelling. It was quite hard 

222 



Eastward Ho! 



work, too, especially when, as frequently hap- 
pened, the laws of gravity entailed that you 
should stand on your head every few minutes 
while the ship made up her mind which way 
she would dodge a particularly truculent wave. 
We had been everywhere and done everything 
from driving a milk-cart to directing a coal 
trust, everything except stoking, that is to 
say. A number of us were coloured — nat- 
urally — we drew no absurd colour line — and 
by a curious coincidence the coloured men were 
all near relations to Booker Washington — all 
except one, who was in my watch and was of a 
religious turn of mind. He was eighty-fourth 
in direct descent from one of the Magi — 
Balthazar, if I remember aright — and very 
proud of it. 

A " scab " does not expect to be popular, but 
I am bound to say that never before or since 
have so many people been anxious to make my 
acquaintance. They used to hang about out- 
side the company's wharf by fifties at a time, 
beseeching us for interviews, and holding out 
half-bricks and paving stones and clubs and 

223 



A Vagabond in New York 

revolvers to tempt us with. We were not des- 
tined to meet them personally; we were taken 
aboard by tug, starting from an East River 
wharf way up on the other side of the island 
where they did not expect us, and when we got 
on shipboard we stayed there. They were not 
discouraged, and when the voyage started they 
chartered a couple of tugs and accompanied 
us down the harbour shouting farewells and 
other things through megaphones. A pleasant 
little rumour went round about then that we 
should probably find dynamite bombs in the 
coal-bunkers, find them after we had fed them 
into the furnaces and departed skyward, that 
is to say. 

If it has its drawbacks, scabbing has its ad- 
vantages as well. With the object-lesson of 
their late employes before them, those In 
authority bestir themselves to make you happy 
and comfortable. They don't have to worry 
about the passengers, because they can't strike, 
or if they did, they would only be playing into 
the Company's hands, who would put them In 
irons or something, and feed them on bread and 

224 



Eastward Ho! 



water and save money. They couldn't do that 
to us, unless they wanted to remain perma- 
nently stranded In mid-Atlantic like the Flying 
Dutchman. We did not waste time either in 
letting them know exactly how matters stood: 
those of us I mean who were not sea-sick. 

The day after leaving New York the stal- 
warts among us explained that we really could 
not work if we were not better fed. We were 
getting the same food as the steerage passen- 
gers at that time, but afterwards we were given 
second-cabin fare, and what we left was given 
to the steerage. We got discontented again a 
day or two later — there were more of us by 
that time — and the captain, and the chief en- 
gineer, and the purser all apologised to us one 
after the other, and said we could have anything 
we felt we fancied — and took it out of the 
unhappy steerage passengers. I never realised 
before the amazing patience, if that is the right 
name for it, of the poor. They were mostly 
Italians from the coal-mining districts of Penn- 
sylvania, who were going back to Italy for a 
holiday. There was a sprinkling of English, 

225 



A Vagabond in New York 

and no Americans. It was an American ship, 
and they knew better. They were paying very 
much what they would have to pay at a de- 
cent hotel in England, yet they were bullied, 
and swindled, and abused by every one, from 
the stewards down to the ship's boys. They 
slept on mattresses stuffed with some kind of 
mouldy seaweed. It was one of my jobs to 
help empty those mattresses overboard after 
we reached England, and I shall not forget it 
in a hurry. They had three iron basins with- 
out any water to wash themselves in — about 
a hundred of them — with the result that they 
didn't wash at all throughout the voyage; such 
a thing as a bath was undreamt oi^^~^ except in 
the advertisements of the line — and the lava- 
tory accommodation would have insulted the 
dirtiest hog that ever wallowed. Most of the 
food they got was uneatable, the meat tainted, 
and so forth. I am not exaggerating when I 
say that we of the crew refused It. Fortu- 
nately for them they were not over-crowded. 
What it must be like on a West-bound trip, 
when the boat is crammed from bow to stern, 

226 



Eastward Ho! 



is wonderful to think. This, as I say, was an 
American boat, but I am told that the condi- 
tions are just the same on the English lines; 
that the French are rather better; and that the 
Germans do actually treat their steerage pas- 
sengers as though they were something mod- 
erately human. I know that not a day passed 
but I thanked the kindly Providence that had 
saved me from such a fate, and made me a free 
stoker and a gentleman. 

It was a pleasant voyage in many ways. 
For one thing, there was no attempt at discip- 
line, so far as the crew was concerned. About 
two-thirds of us — stokers, stewards, deck- 
hands, or whatever our technical names might 
be — had never been on board ship before. 
The unhappy officers soon found it was useless 
to try to teach us anything, so they did the 
work themselves. The rest of us spent our 
time grumbling and playing cards and tossing 
for ha'pence when we were not flirting with 
the young ladles of the steerage. When we 
were off duty we spent most of our time with 
the steerage passengers — which was, of course, 

227 



A Vagabond in New York 

strictly forbidden — and a very decent set of 
people they were, with, as I have said, an in- 
finite capacity of patience. I amused myself 
trying to get up a conspiracy among them to 
murder the dispensary steward, whose manners 
annoyed me, in order to call attention to their 
grievances, and I think that something might 
have come of it if one of the men had not pos- 
sessed a mandolin and another a guitar. Ac- 
cordingly, instead of murdering and mutinying, 
they spent their whole time dancing and singing 
" Funiculi, Funicula." There was, of course, 
a great preponderance of men, who thus had 
to dance together, and most beautifully they 
waltzed. Some of the Anglo-Saxons endeav- 
oured to introduce the Turkey Trot and the 
Grizzly Bear Hug, but they were frowned 
upon, I am glad to say. 

We reached port in safety at last, more 
through luck than judgment, I for one believe, 
and there I drew my money and got into the 
funny little English toy-train, and raced up to 
London through the pretty little countryside 
that looks so neat and clean and sweet that you 

228 



Eastward Ho! 



are kept in agonies all the time lest somebody 
shall drop a piece of paper out of the train on 
it and spoil it. It was a weird voyage and I 
don't know that I particularly want to play at 
being a scab stoker again. But I did learn 
one piece of wisdom which was more than 
worth It. The next time I am very hard up 
and want to go to America, I shall not go as 
a steerage passenger; I shall save my money 
and go as a stowaway. They are quite as well 
fed and lodged and very much better treated. 



a:H£ END 



229 




I 



